From the City News interview series…
My City: AS220’s Rhode Show Coordinator David Gonzalez Fosters Young People’s Life Skills Through Art
This summer, when “Celebrate Providence” makes its way back into your local neighborhood parks, a handful of the City’s most talented performing artists will be on hand to showcase their best work. Among them, The Rhode [...]

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Good weather is here, and the hackable events are poppin’. A quick rundown:
Providence Open Market: gotta love how the organizers of this outdoor market [downtown | local vendors | Saturdays] are using the online discussion forums of Urban Planet (see Hackable Places, below left) to communicate to the public, get feedback, and decide what changes [...]

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Out of the blue, I got a call from Providence Business News last week to talk about Hackable City. Working past my fumbling attempts at describing the concept of hackability as applied to an urban community, David Ortiz wrote a good article on the blog and some of the other hackable stuff happening in Providence.
Having [...]

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I dance with Providence Public Schools a lot. As a parent of a first grader in a mainstream elementary school. As an internship mentor to a freshman at the MET alternative high school. As a volunteer participant ranging across PTA meetings, the facilities master plan, and the East Side Public Education Coalition. I spend an [...]

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“There’s an intense focus on openness, sharing information, as both an ideal and a practical strategy to get things done”
A quote from Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year old CEO of the internet phenom, Facebook, on redefining “hacker” caught my eye. For those of us who haven’t spent time with Facebook, it is making a jump from [...]

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From the City News Interview Series…along the same lines of the entry on the NY Sun Works sustainable urban farming project, urban gardens in Providence have been quietly flourishing in the background. However, as property values rise and the affordable housing bond drives infill development, less vacant lots will be available for urban farming, forcing [...]

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New York has been doing some heavy lifting on sustainability. Given that cities consume 75% of the world’s energy, it would only seem to make sense, and its good to see Bloomberg and NYC leading the charge here.
New York Sun Works has created the Science Barge, which combines environmental education and sustainable agriculture. I’m not [...]

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WARNING: Conceptual abstracts about hackability lie within this post. Don’t read further if that sort of stuff makes your head hurt.
Dan Hill is a guy who knows a lot about a lot. An interaction designer out of London, he spends his time at the intersections of the web, music, architecture, and digital media…with a bit [...]

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I’ve never been much into Second Life and the other alternative worlds that have caught fire online of late. My current passion much more about how the web can support and enhance our pavement-level interactions, which often get short shrift to the virtual world. Last week at the Providence Geeks confab, I saw a project [...]

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From the series of City News interviews…
My City: Neighborhood Parks Services Director Beth Charlebois: “Neighbors should feel ownership, a sense of belonging and community, and happiness”
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