Entries Tagged 'community' ↓

For the past year or so I’ve been tracking trends in analytics, sensing systems, community feedback services, and visualization & modeling tools as they might be applied to intentional civic design. IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative is both a fine example and a major signal of the move towards a deeper understanding of natural & human systems and the technologies that enable us to model and reprogram our world. What this means for my local community is that we’re increasingly able to collate run-time data about our city that can be scraped, sorted, analyzed, visualized, and used to inform behavior, policy, planning, and optimizations. Services like EveryBlock and San Francisco CrimeSpotting, as well as the data visualization work carried out by Stamen Design, MIT’s CitySENSE, and many others illustrate some of the ways local data can be harvested, parsed, & visualized to derive valuable behavioral patterns about a city.

Such services have mostly been cobbled together using Google Maps and limited access to data feeds released by civic bodies but there is a growing trend for city governments to mandate standardization of their metrics into structured data streams (XML, RDF) and to aggregate & publish these feeds to the public. Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, announced today the DataSF project which aims to create a “clearinghouse of structured, raw & machine-readable gov data”. This commitment by such a major & influential city is a huge step in legitimizing the value of open data and engaging developers & innovators to build better services for optimizing civic functioning. It is this intersection of government openness & data standardization that underlies the Gov 2.0 movement and reinforces the emerging metaphor of City as Platform.

In reviewing the General Plan 2030 [PDF] of my own city, Santa Cruz, Ca., I see the standard (and important!) list of local resources, community planning & preservation concerns, issues regarding land use & economic development, etc… but what’s missing is any reference to the increasingly large and important data shadow cast by our civic, ecological, financial, and social structures. I think this is typical of most cities that consider both event-driven data and cloud-mediated activities as tangentially arising off of primary traditional institutions. Business has sales metrics, the Department of Works has road repair updates, and farmer’s have crop reports. But in order for a city to become a platform, and for civic planning to truly step into the Information Age, the importance of it’s data shadow must be addressed as a fundamentally critical component of it’s overall functionality. Just as water resources, agriculture, and emergency services are important vertical columns in the map of city planning, so too is the dynamic body of information produced and mediated by local activities. Civic planning must consider how this data can be leveraged to better understand and optimize the vibrancy and resilience of the community.

There are many open source tools to enable creation of local mash-ups and visualizations but the fundamental roadblock impeding such progress is the missing mandate for civic bodies to convert their data into open & structured standards like XML, KML, and RDF. Just as companies invest increasingly in business intelligence platforms, executive dashboards, and analytic platforms in order to better understand their operations and model future implementations, so too must city planners underwrite their IT departments with the funds necessary to standardize & open their data so the behaviors & patterns of the city may better reveal themselves to analysis. It is a meager investment that will pay off immeasurably within just a few years. Implementing such a strategy will bring a tremendous amount of transparency into civic operational processes and stimulate a rich ecology of innovation, while engaging the community directly in the enterprise of building more efficient local systems.

[Cross-posted from URBEINGRECORDED]

Some rough notes from the weekend on the Northern California coast… I’m trying to get at the core of my general orientation towards the world. It’s coming into focus at the nexus of evolutionary biology & technology. Or…

How does evolutionary biology express through culture & technology?

Requirements of human biosurvivial & social identity (compare to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs):

water, food shelter, fecundity, mortality, socialization, cognition, communication, migration, lineage, history, myth, aspiration, discovery, expression, emotion, time, transcendence.

Global comm networks are rapidly bringing the world closer and changing human cognition in ways we cannot yet fully see. What are the impacts and consequences of the emerging self-identification of the human species? How will we manage the human agency? Do we have a global strategy yet, or just a Balkanized polyculture of mostly-competing sub-identities? (Obv. the latter.) Compare to the Greek & Roman consciousness that embodied emotional states & psychological constructs in the mythic drama of deities & demigods. The western religious myth of Earth as resource and Earth as purgatory elevated us above the natural world. The planet is now urgently reminding us that we are within the natural world – a subset embedded in a much larger and ultimately self-interested system.

The assertion of the natural world compels us towards alignment with biomimetic solutions & protocols. Or towards oblivion as we are corrected by the planetary system. We cannot destroy the world before it limits our ability to do it damage. The compulsion towards environmental protection is a species-wide awareness rising from our very cells and fueled by our growing awareness of our impact on the planetary ecology. Adapt or perish.

Socio-economic & ecological adaptation is not on a uniform schedule. Diverse states & peoples have their own schedules to work out as they march up the pyramid of civilization. Does this demand caretakers & parent states? Globalization is a normalizing force, but inequities between self-appointed parents and emerging economies will grow, as will the ability of smaller networks to inflict their will on states, NGO’s, & global systems. This democratization of technological empowerment is yet another major current working through our species. We’re getting stronger yet the morality(?) & responsibility expected to wield this power is not uniform across cultures & peoples. Core biosurvival needs remain the primary driver, exposed to shifting climates and diminishing conventional energy sources. There will be (more) blood.

The race is whether the technologies of liberation & salvation will outpace the technologies of destruction & exploitation. Of course, the real technology underneath both is the human brain – a much more subtle & powerful tool, highly malleable but stubbornly resistant to overt change.

[I wrote this a couple months ago but I think it might be appropriate for SC Geeks. It's not explicitly tech-oriented, but the whole domain of local resiliency and community self reliance is actually quite a ripe one for possible service & solution development. This piece may seem a bit alarmist but I'm just trying to acknowledge the trends. I actually see this scenario as being quite positive as we transition away from the global economic debtor paradigm towards empowered knowledge/production networks and local community sustainability.]

By my own local allegiance these are recommendations for Santa Cruz County but they’re equally applicable to many other communities.

The ability of our federal government to manage it’s domestic responsibilities is weakening every day. The fallout from the current global financial crisis will likely crush already-strained state budgets, especially for those states like California that are on the verge of bankruptcy. As our metropolitan centers reel from rising unemployment and crumbling infrastructures, the federal government will become more and more preoccupied with attending to the growing chaos in cities. Simple services like electricity, gas, water, and emergency response will come under increasing stress as budgets are no longer able to sufficiently maintain the infrastructure necessary to provide them. Add to this the very real possibility of domestic militias responding to the weakness of the state by adopting 4th generation guerrilla tactics and targeting critical services directly. Amidst growing global instability it may only be a matter of time before the next Black Swan hits and all communities are forced to fall back on self-reliance. It’s clear that state and corporate interests are not always in-line with the needs of communities and that we cannot rely solely on their support in times of crisis. Communities must take the long view and build resilient systems and solutions now.

Santa Cruz county is ideally situated to make substantial gains towards self-reliance and resiliency. The land is geographically distinct, bordered to the Northeast by the Santa Cruz mountains which run up the coast into San Mateo county. To the South, our basin gently rolls into the Salinas Valley – one of the most fertile regions on the planet. The northwest corridor is a narrow and rugged coastal channel rich in farming and solar and wind resources. And to the West lies the great and bountiful Monterey Bay. We have copious amounts of sun throughout the year, a strong rainy season, and vast water tables underneath most of the county, as well as seasonal winds and numerous rivers running off the mountains down through the basin to the sea. Our strongest natural resources are agriculture and fishing, and with careful stewardship both will continue to prosper indefinitely. Our intellectual resources are equally robust and vital, with UCSC home to many of the brightest minds and most valuable research in marine science, bioscience, and engineering.

As the eyes of the state focus increasingly on major civic centers, which will see the largest decline in wealth and stability, smaller communities like Santa Cruz will be left to manage their own resources. We will be less able to rely on the state for infrastructure and services support but, conversely, more free to pursue self-govenrance, self-reliance, and resiliency. With the decline of all state and civic budgets, there will be great economic advantages to coordinated home-grown DIY solutions to pick up the slack of state and corporate providers and re-write the power dynamic in favor of our local community.

The de-salination pilot at Long Marine Lab is an excellent example of the investments Santa Cruz County should be making in this transitional time. The victory of FLOW to re-purchase ownership of the Felton water table from CalAm is another huge step towards local resilience. The city implementation of green building codes is another step in the right direction, though it has failed to make building more affordable and less exposed to economic instabilities. More and more structures are integrating solar panels and more and more new developments are being designed with the principles of sustainability in mind. But most of these effort are limited to specific investments and are not driven by the general welfare and stability of the county as a whole. It’s time for Santa Cruz to take control of it’s future and manage it’s resources as an intentional system with the security and welfare of the community as the guiding principle.

These are some of the strategies we should be evaluating and discussing:
- Work to provide incentives, leases, and subsidies for home owners and business to add solar panels to their properties.
- Underwrite Santa Cruz credit unions for loans to small businesses that produce goods from 100% local, sustainable resources.
- Support local farmer’s by lowering their property taxes in exchange for reduced costs of food to local businesses and consumers.
- Secure more avenues for our farmers to sell goods into the local economy.
- Invest in local biodiesel providers and offer incentives for restaurants to downstream their oil waste into fuel conversion.
- Repurchase all regional water rights.
- Clean our rivers, re-populate the salmon runs, and investigate minimally intrusive hydroelectric opportunities.
- Expand de-salination efforts for the city and encourage rainwater collection for homes.
- Invest in local fabrication and light-scale manufacturing resources.
- Seriously consider light rail to San Jose and San Francisco. Seek state bonds while they’re still available.
- Work with UCSC to directly fund and incentivise research efforts towards more efficient alternative energy solutions (eg wave and kinetic; waste energy), as well as developing more effective policies and solutions for the ongoing stewardship of the Monterey Bay.
- Begin construction of wind farms on the North Coast and exposed ares of the Santa Cruz mountains.
- Integrate all local power sources into a Santa Cruz micro-grid capable of generating and storing enough energy to power the city. Excess power generation will feed back to the PG&E grid but can be locked in the event of large-scale disruptions in service, restricting power access to Santa Cruz.
- Develop free citywide wi-fi access using solar-powered routers and local servers.
- Engineer a web of sustainability resources, communication channels, and emergency information services running on local servers (Cruzio). The recent Summer fire season saw a huge increase in the use of web-based communication channels to coordinate efforts. These channels should be locally run and should be resilient to regional or national disruptions.
- Investigate alternative script and currency options in the event of a substantial decline of the US dollar and resultant inflationary threats.
- Do not enforce evictions of renters in foreclosed properties. Fight to keep people in their homes. More homeless will undermine the legitimacy of our city governors.
- Establish supported homeless camps before they’re established without oversight.
- Include network and systems-level education in high school curriculum’s with special focus on our local networks.

These are considerable investments but we would be wise to make them while we can. State and local budgets are unlikely to grow any time soon and will more likely become increasingly constrained. These near-term investments will be offset by mid-term gains, and our community will be less bound to the financial needs and whims of state and corporate providers. Sustainability and self-reliance are the most economically and socially productive investments we can make right now, before it’s too late and Santa Cruz gets dragged down by it’s national and corporate dependencies. A resilient community is a safe community. And a self-sustaining city is an economically prosperous city.

[Many acknowledgments to John Robb.]