Difference between revisions of "City as Software"

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[[Image:city-as-software-maggie-nichols.jpg|center|600px]]
 
===Definition===
 
===Definition===
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City as Software is the idea that a city is a malleable, writable system capable of being edited and changed by its citizens. Adam Greenfield wrote that seeing a city as software would allow "people a fundamentally new way to engage and co-author the environment they inhabit."<ref>Comment on Greenfield, Adam. Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism July 7th, 2010. http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/07/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-towards-a-readwrite-urbanism/  by Adam Greenfield in response to Fred Scharmen - July 7, 2010 at 1:02 pm. Accessed Jul 2010.</ref> Examples include cities that have open data sets that allow citizens to interface with a city's data. Some cities release data and encourage developers to build applications on top of it.
  
Seeing a city as software would allow "people a fundamentally new way to engage and co-author the environment they inhabit."<ref>Comment on [http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/07/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-towards-a-readwrite-urbanism/ Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism] by Adam Greenfield in response to Fred Scharmen - July 7, 2010 at 1:02 pm.</ref>
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Designing a read/write city can speed up error correction, detection and understanding in a city. It also provides government officials and city workers a way to utilize data from citizens without hiring additional workers or stretching themselves too thin. The idea behind a City as Software is that the city becomes a site of evolution, of error detection and improvement that is detected and corrected by everyday citizens instead of a handful of people employed on behalf of the city.  
  
===Excerpts from Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism===
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Open Government advocate Max Ogden points out that governments are good at providing data, but they are not close enough to the problems of the city and community to understand how to create the best interface for that data. Thus, a government's job should be to provide open data, and a citizen's job should be to build on top of that data and make it useable to the city.<ref>Ogden, Max. Why middleware is the key to a successful gov 2.0. IgniteGov GOSCON 2011. Oct 2011. Portland, Oregon. http://goscon.org/ignitespeakers Accessed Jul 2011.</ref>
<blockquote>“You provide citizens with a variety of congenial ways to initiate trouble tickets, whether they’re most comfortable using the phone, a mobile application or website, or a text message. You display currently open cases, and gather resolved tickets in a permanent archive or resource. You use an algorithm to assign priority to open issues on a three-axis metric:</blockquote>
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<blockquote>“(a) Scale. How many people are affected by the issue? Does this concern just me, me and my immediate neighbors, our whole block, the neighborhood, or the entire city?</blockquote>
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Ogden created a map of the various smells in Portland, Oregon that allowed citizens to geotag and report smells around the city. The data that came back provided insights not only into the particular regions of the city, but environmental hazards as well. When the city understood the power of placing data reporting into the hands of citizens, they commissioned Ogden to build another version of the app that allowed citizens to report toxic smells. This helped the city to isolate and identify toxic spills and environmental issues that individual city inspectors didn't have the ability or resources to measure.<ref>Ogden, Max. Portland Smells. http://portlandsmells.org Accessed Jul 2010.</ref> Ogden also created an API for the City of Portland called PDXAPI<ref>Ogden, Max. PDXAPI http://pdxapi.com/</ref>. The API took data in awkward-to-use formats and parsed it out so that it could be easily read in a browser and used in a number of citizen-oriented applications.
 
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<blockquote>“(b) Severity. How serious is the issue? In descending order, will it result in imminent loss of life, injury or the destruction of property? Is this, rather, an aesthetic hazard, or even simply a suggestion for improvement?</blockquote>
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<blockquote>“(c) Urgency. How long has the tag been open?</blockquote>
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<blockquote>“Because a great many urban issues are going to crop up repeatedly, routinely, perennially, perhaps you offer the kinds of tools content-management software for discussion sites has had to evolve over the years: ways to moderate tickets up or down, or mark their resolution as particularly impactful.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>“You assign tickets to specified agents.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>“Then, of course, (((yes, of course Adam, do go on))) you apply the usual variety of visualizations to the live data, allowing patterns to jump right out. Which city department has the best record for closing out tickets most quickly, and with the highest approval rating? What kind of issues generally take longest to address to everyone’s satisfaction?</blockquote>
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<blockquote>“So. To reiterate. As I see it, a contemporary framework for citizen responsiveness suited for big cities would offer most if not all of the following features…”<ref>[http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/07/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-towards-a-readwrite-urbanism/ Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism]
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</ref></blockquote>
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===Related Reading===
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*[[Adam Greenfield]]
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*[[The Civic Web]]
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*[http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/07/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-towards-a-readwrite-urbanism/ Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism]
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==References==
 
==References==
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Latest revision as of 20:16, 28 November 2011

City-as-software-maggie-nichols.jpg

Definition

City as Software is the idea that a city is a malleable, writable system capable of being edited and changed by its citizens. Adam Greenfield wrote that seeing a city as software would allow "people a fundamentally new way to engage and co-author the environment they inhabit."[1] Examples include cities that have open data sets that allow citizens to interface with a city's data. Some cities release data and encourage developers to build applications on top of it.

Designing a read/write city can speed up error correction, detection and understanding in a city. It also provides government officials and city workers a way to utilize data from citizens without hiring additional workers or stretching themselves too thin. The idea behind a City as Software is that the city becomes a site of evolution, of error detection and improvement that is detected and corrected by everyday citizens instead of a handful of people employed on behalf of the city.

Open Government advocate Max Ogden points out that governments are good at providing data, but they are not close enough to the problems of the city and community to understand how to create the best interface for that data. Thus, a government's job should be to provide open data, and a citizen's job should be to build on top of that data and make it useable to the city.[2]

Ogden created a map of the various smells in Portland, Oregon that allowed citizens to geotag and report smells around the city. The data that came back provided insights not only into the particular regions of the city, but environmental hazards as well. When the city understood the power of placing data reporting into the hands of citizens, they commissioned Ogden to build another version of the app that allowed citizens to report toxic smells. This helped the city to isolate and identify toxic spills and environmental issues that individual city inspectors didn't have the ability or resources to measure.[3] Ogden also created an API for the City of Portland called PDXAPI[4]. The API took data in awkward-to-use formats and parsed it out so that it could be easily read in a browser and used in a number of citizen-oriented applications.

References

  1. Comment on Greenfield, Adam. Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism July 7th, 2010. http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/07/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-towards-a-readwrite-urbanism/ by Adam Greenfield in response to Fred Scharmen - July 7, 2010 at 1:02 pm. Accessed Jul 2010.
  2. Ogden, Max. Why middleware is the key to a successful gov 2.0. IgniteGov GOSCON 2011. Oct 2011. Portland, Oregon. http://goscon.org/ignitespeakers Accessed Jul 2011.
  3. Ogden, Max. Portland Smells. http://portlandsmells.org Accessed Jul 2010.
  4. Ogden, Max. PDXAPI http://pdxapi.com/