Crowdsourcing

The city of Lincoln, Nebraska, is asking locals to submit and vote on ideas to integrate into its new master plan, hoping to get citizens more involved in the process and test out unconventional ideas.

August 18, 2010 - Lincoln Journal Star

Many thanks to Wired’s Jeff Howe who’s 2006 article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” put an effective label at what the internet was doing to business.  Building from Web 2.0 applications focused on social media like Facebook and on-line communities, it’s become a popular and controversial term in tech circles.  For those not as familiar with the idea, let’s consult the most often used example of crowdsourcing – Wikipedia.   “Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions.

March 24, 2010 - Scott Page

I had the opportuntity, at the 2009 national planning conference in Minneapolis, to present (together with my colleague Christian Peralta Madera) ten free web applications that can be used to support planning. Approximately 350 participants attended the session. Since the presentation, I've received over 100 emails congratulating us on the practical nature of the presentation, and requesting links to the websites we presented. Since our presentation was a hands-on demonstration, this blog entry outlines the ten technologies, and provides links to examples of the technology in practice and resources so you can experiment with the technologies.

May 27, 2009 - Chris Steins

What can we as planners learn from president-elect Barak Obama's use of technology? President-elect Obama has been an early adopter of Web 2.0 technologies both in his campaign and the transition to the White House. It is likely that the Obama administration will continue to use Web 2.0 technologies to both engage the public in determining policies and to make government operations more transparent. As planners, there are a lot of great tools and techniques that we can use in the planning processes. Here are some of the tools that the Obama team have used that could be used in planning.

January 19, 2009 - Chris Steins