The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participato...

Guest blogger John Geraci has spent the last six years making life in cities better with the use of web technologies. His latest project, DIYcity.org, has web developers and urban planners all over the world teaming up to create open source tools for residents of cities everywhere. Prior to DIYcity, Geraci co-founded the hyperlocal news network Outside.in.

Highlighted by hrheingold

Instead of just cutting services however, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the unusual step of posting a survey online for residents of the city to fill out. For each category of city service, the survey asked residents, "what program would you reduce to help balance the budget?", followed by an itemized list of services they could choose from.

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In another sense though it begged a larger question: if you're going to involve city residents in these issues, why stop at asking people which services they would like to cut? Why not go a bit further and ask them for input on how to keep these services, while making them leaner, more efficient, and smarter? And why not then ask for their help in making those changes happen?

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These are questions cities everywhere should be asking today, as they find themselves faced with the challenge of gigantic budget shortfalls brought on by the recession. The conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities. But it should not be about which services to eliminate, it should be about how to reinvent these services as modern, efficient things, how to make them work at a fraction of their current cost, and, while we're at it, how to make them better than they are now.

Highlighted by takuya514

The conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities. But it should not be about which services to eliminate, it should be about how to reinvent these services as modern, efficient things, how to make them work at a fraction of their current cost, and, while we're at it, how to make them better than they are now.

Why? Because cities don't have the money to improve, or even sustain these services on their own. Because people have good ideas, often more innovative than the ones coming from the cities themselves. And because increasingly, people have the means to actually build and implement these services - not as centralized, closed, top-down systems we think of as public services today, but as distributed, participatory web-based systems built using data open to all.

Highlighted by hrheingold

Why? Because cities don't have the money to improve, or even sustain these services on their own. Because people have good ideas, often more innovative than the ones coming from the cities themselves. And because increasingly, people have the means to actually build and implement these services - not as centralized, closed, top-down systems we think of as public services today, but as distributed, participatory web-based systems built using data open to all.

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Why? Because cities don't have the money to improve, or even sustain these services on their own. Because people have good ideas, often more innovative than the ones coming from the cities themselves.

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Take for example the case of the New York City MTA, which currently operates at a budget deficit of $1.2 billion, and has been trying and failing for almost 20 years to implement a realtime tracking system for the city's buses, at a cost of millions. As the MTA sees it, their two options are 1. pay for a gigantic, centralized, monolithic tracking system or 2. don't have bus tracking. (And with their current budget shortfall, it seems like option 2 is the only real choice for them). What if, instead, they entertained the idea of implementing an open bus tracking system, one that relied to some extent on aggregated individual input from bus riders? What if they then crowdsourced ideas on how best to do this? And finally, what if they cooperated with the people who came forward with ideas, to make it easy for them to implement them?

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Of course these new sorts of user-built services are beginning to pop up anyway, even without the blessing of the city agencies they help.

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Imagine now what would happen if cities did throw their weight behind this kind of innovation? The landscape of those cities would change virtually overnight, with legions of new applications springing up to provide residents with every sort of information conceivable, making their decisions more informed, making their movements more coordinated, and ultimately making the cities themselves work better. This change would happen at a fraction of the cost of any proposals for change currently being considered by cities around the world. And much of that cost, for development and operation, would be offloaded from the city itself to the individuals building and using these services.

Highlighted by hrheingold

Imagine now what would happen if cities did throw their weight behind this kind of innovation? The landscape of those cities would change virtually overnight, with legions of new applications springing up to provide residents with every sort of information conceivable, making their decisions more informed, making their movements more coordinated, and ultimately making the cities themselves work better. This change would happen at a fraction of the cost of any proposals for change currently being considered by cities around the world. And much of that cost, for development and operation, would be offloaded from the city itself to the individuals building and using these services.

Highlighted by takuya514

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