The morning post from Governing.com describes a good idea:

The National City Network, a service of the National League of Cities, is an easy-to-use comprehensive resource that connects city leaders and engaged citizens with the knowledge needed to build stronger communities. By organizing and delivering the most up-to- date information, instantly connecting users to their peers, and providing unprecedented access to expert forums, the National City Network is an intelligent gateway for all of America’s cities and towns.

As a fledgling resource, the site is fairly limited. So far, there are links to articles from think tanks and the press on matters of local government policy. But it has the potential to be a solid resource. It is not geared exclusively for public officials, and explicitly is intended to foster interaction among various parties that have an interest in current thinking on policy and current best practices across a range of issues (among them, economic development, planning and land use, infrastructure, and public management).

Okay, somebody out there try this. Somebody who knows their way around Portland, Oregon. And then you, somebody, whoever you are, send an email reporting back. Because this is Google’s new trip planner beta — it uses Google Maps and transit info to tell you how to get from here to there on bus and so forth, as long as “here” and “there” are in Portland. And I haven’t spent real time in Portland in almost 20 years.

But it’s Google, right? And they’re smarter than all of us.

From Saturday’s Washington Post:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

It would appear that the effort to provide free wifi as part of the effort to “stimulate resettlement and relocation to the devastated city” ran afoul of BellSouth’s good will. Of course, BellSouth’s position is not inconsistent with that taken by incumbents across the nation vis-à-vis muni wifi, but in this instance it paints that stance in the starkest possible terms. Particularly since the ravaged wired infrastructure is making it hard for businesses to get up and running, wifi offers at least a stop-gap.

As suggested by muniwireless, BellSouth’s response: “Humbug!”

As a new father struggling with finding baby names (our little guy was two months early), it was a pleasure to stumble across Baby Name Wizard (this requires java). The site tracks the popularity of baby names through time. The interactive design is fascinating and a great example of how to pack a lot of overlapping information into one clear graphic. It seems the name we chose - Kai - is gaining popularity. I’m always behind the trends.

What will be the next public participation technology? Here’s one possibility… wireless laptops with electronic ink capability (and built in hand generators to boot!). All packaged to cost less than today’s keypad polling devices. Way cool!

1. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
2. http://news.com.com/2300-1044_3-5884639-3.html

Too bad they’re not for sale, but I’m sure others will follow.

Just to keep everyone updated on the continuing development of Wi-Fi, Muni-wireless released a new report on the state of the Wi-Fi market. The long and short of it is the market is expanding rapidly with just about every city looking to get in on the action.

On the flip side, the Philadelphia Inquirer last weekend ran a story about the uncertain future of wireless as a city-led initiative. The usual questions surface - What is the cost to the taxpayers? Is there demand? Is the plan realistic? And finally, should the government be doing any of this? I find the last question the most critical. Governments have always guided markets based upon where and how they use their money. As markets have evolved, how governments respond to these changes is critical to meet the host of relatively new issues impacting urban areas. Can someone point me to a good discussion about what role the government can and should play versus one that asks whether they are simply in or out?

Daily Wireless has the details on the Sea Launch of Immarsat 4-F2.

From Space.com:

The second step in a $1.5 billion program to create a mobile broadband communications network spanning the globe for users at sea, in the air and on land roared into space today.

The Inmarsat 4-F2 satellite lifted off from a floating platform in the equatorial Pacific Ocean at 1407 GMT (9:07 a.m. EST) atop a commercial Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket.

The three-stage booster took about 85 minutes to haul the 13,108-pound (5,945-kilogram) spacecraft to the desired altitude.

When it enters service from geostationary orbit 22,300 miles (35,888 kilometers) above Earth next year, the craft will join the Inmarsat 4-F1 satellite that was successfully launched on Lockheed Martin’s Atlas 5 rocket in March from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Together, the two craft will deliver broadband communications to 85 percent of the world.

“Putting almost half-megabit data speeds for people to access globally where terrestrial networks don’t go we see as a fundamental service,” said Inmarsat CEO Andrew Sukawaty. “It’s really about taking the office with you where terrestrial networks don’t go economically.”

Inmarsat’s newest generation of satellites come with the tag line “broadband for a mobile planet.” Built in Europe by EADS Astrium, the Inmarsat 4-series spacecraft will provide office-like broadband services such as Internet, email, voice and data-relay using laptop and palm-sized terminals.

What does this tell us about the power of Google? Does the 900-pound gorilla set policy in the Oregon statehouse (like other 900-pound gorillas do everwhere else)? Or is this good news for us little people?

On Tuesday Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski announced the contribution of $350,000 by search technology leader Google Inc. to a joint open source technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State University. With the grant, the universities will collaborate to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide. The universities will also help provide a bridge between Oregon’s universities and Oregon’s growing open technology industry…..

The new open source initiative will create a joint-university open source technology center and organization in early 2006 to: design and coordinate curricula across the Oregon University System; offer student internships and expand its technology capacity for the growing number of open source projects and communities it supports; further the commercialization of open source innovations by facilitating linkages to the region’s network of venture capital firms, technology companies and incubators such, as the Beaverton-based Open Technology Business Center; and partner on key educational events, such as the inaugural Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) recently held in Portland.

For the full press release (and much more info and images), check out the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL).

Found at GovTech.

Well, the trend continues. Here’s the question. Below we see two starkly different counties. Each is developing a wireless plan, perhaps for the same reason. They seem to be premised on the assumption that they are filling gaps that the private sector won’t fill. The question: What if your entire county is a gap (as is the case, putatively, with Exhibit A below more than with Exhibit B)? What if there’s absolutely no business case? Is it still important to build? In Exhibit B, one could argue there’s a more likely market that the private sector could tap, but, we suppose, it b-band is not being provided.

Exhibit A:

From Governing.com, we see that Sandoval County, NM (due north of Albuquerque, population ~90K) is planning a county-wide wireless deployment that would ”would combine wi-fi, WiMAX and fiber-optic technology, according to an executive of the company putting the system together.”

According to the Free New Mexican:

Sandoval County plans to become the largest county in the United States to have uninterrupted wireless Internet service.

The county comprises 3,700 square miles, three times the size of Rhode Island. But when the project is completed , people should be able to drive anywhere in the county and maintain an Internet connection with a laptop computer, said Jonathan Mann, chief executive officer of Olla Grande Inc., which is putting the system together.

Sandoval County has a leg up on the network because Rio Rancho, which completed a city-wide WiFi system last week, is located within the county. Most of the county is directly west of Santa Fe County and includes nine pueblos, including Cochiti.

But while the Rio Rancho system is based on WiFi technology — small radio transmitters mounted on street lights — the county project would combine WiFi, WiMAX and fiber-optic technology , Mann said. WiMAX technology, which is still in development, uses large towers to broadcast broadband service over big areas, a radius of up to 31 miles.

It’s worth noting that the article cited above contains space for comment. And the only comment present when I visited is from an independently employed private sector wifi provider who, as we might expect, thinks muni wifi is anathema to the proper role of government. The County, which has web space devoted to explaining its broadband infrastructure plan, claims that the population density of the county prevents private sector service provision.

Which leads us to

Exhibit B:

Rather than unveiling a county-wide process, Oakland County, MI (due north of Detroit, extremely wealthy, population 1.2 million) has a phased plan for pilot deployment at a few selected communities by 2006. According to a press release (which I saw at MuniWireless):

The Wireless Oakland Project Team today selected seven pilot projects that will serve as a starting point for the deployment of wireless internet service throughout the County. The seven pilot projects are located in the communities of Royal Oak, Pontiac, Troy, Birmingham, Madison Heights, Oak Park and Wixom hereto view detailed maps of the pilot areas within these communities.

“We are humbled by our local government’s continued commitment to Wireless Oakland and look forward to them being a strategic partner in the initiative,” Oakland County Executive, L. Brooks Patterson said. “The Project Team had approximately thirty local governments who expressed interest in being a pilot community and it was difficult for us to select the final communities.”

The Pilot Projects will be started by the end of 2005 and should be completed during the first quarter of 2006. County-wide wireless internet coverage is expected in mid to late 2007. “This is a major milestone in our effort to blanket Oakland County’s entire 910 square miles with wireless internet service, a portion of which will be offered free of charge, Patterson said.

The County’s private-sector partner will own, operate and maintain the project. Free Internet service will be offered at the lower bandwidth, but the private sector partners will charge fees for higher end service.

Clark Kelso, California’s Chief Information Officer, was kind enough to respond to my recent post, California Updates State IT Strategic Plan, commenting on the state’s new strategic plan and what I perceived to be a lack of focus on making technology accessible to people with disabilities.

Clark writes:

…I am pleased to see that our planning activities are being followed so closely in the trade press.

The last paragraph in your article suggests we may not be paying sufficient attention to Section 508 issues in our web developments. Although we did not cite Section 508 in the strategic plan, accessibility is the very heart of our efforts. As your article notes,
the very first goal of the plan is to “Make government services more accessible to citizens and State clients.” That concept of accessibility includes not only opening up new, technology-enabled vehicles for delivering services, information and benefits, but the goal of ensuring that those vehicles — as well as all existing vehicles — are ADA accessible and compliant.

Our Portal Steering Committee, which was only recently created and is just starting to warm up to the topic, has already expressly recognized ADA compliance as a required component of the State’s web presence. The following link plainly identifies ADA accessibility and compliance as a necessary aspect of the user interface:
http://www.cio.ca.gov/PDFs/Portal_Committee-040805.pdf (PDF, 100KB)

The State’s web pages are NOT always appropriately accessible, but this is most certainly an issue that we take seriously at the highest planning levels, and we encourage all departments to make accessibility a high priority.

I’m sure that being the State Chief Information Officer must be a wildly complicated and challenging task. Just reading the list of “roles and responsibilities” California’s CIO is charged with made my head spin:

The State CIO establishes a strategic vision for the coordinated planning, acquisition and development of cost-effective information technology solutions to business problems… The State CIO’s role, therefore, is as a strategic planner and architect for the State’s information technology programs and as a leader in formulating and advancing a vision for that program.

It’s gratifying that among the many competing issues the CIO must address each day, accessibility is on his mind, and he took the time to write and let us know. I stand corrected.

So we’re hiring for two new positions at Urban Insight (the company that supports Planetizen). We’re hiring a Web Designer/Developer (with preference given to candidates with backgrounds in planning), and a Web Developer / Programmer.

I published the job announcements to several lists and also on a few online services that I’ve had success with in the past. I’ve received a fair number of responses, and, thank goodness, and several highly-qualified candidates (although not so many with backgrounds in planning/architecture/urban esign).

I pulled out several of the funnier comments that appeared in a few of the less competitive applications (all identifying information removed):

Shortest cover letter:

Saw your ad and wanted to apply. Here is my resume.

Unusual statements:

“Please go through these sites before committing with me.”

“I am a web designer seeking a position which should enable me to assist your company by offering the highest quality of work in a professional manner.”

“i need a good opportunity to work professionals in Flash/Multimedia Animation & designing, i have god experience in flash Interactive animation inspire with dynamic factory site, i had done lots of Official Movie websites,”

“P.S. If we work together ill throw in a free domain name.”

“I can offer you my services at a much cheaper rate (Approx USD $9 to USD $12 an hour or a monthly retainer of USD$1800) since I am based in India.”

And my personal favorite:

“I am looking for positions starting at $190K.”

While not strictly relevant to planning, it’s always interesting to compare plans prepared by planners with plans prepared by other branches of government, in this case the California CIO and the IT Council Strategic Plan Committee have prepared the new California State Information Technology Strategic Plan (PDF, 220KB)

The plan lists six impressive strategic goals:

Abhijeet presented last week at the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEC) 2005 San Diego Regional Conference on open source content management frameworks for building websites for nonprofit. He published his fabulous presentation online under a creative commons license:

Building Websites For Nonprofits With Open Source Content Management Frameworks

He really knows what he’s presenting on, since much of his presentation is based on his hands-on experience with a massive project we just completed here at Urban Insight. We completed a migration of Planetizen from our own five-year old homegrown CMS to Drupal. It was a six-month process, but well worth it. We have a much stronger taxonomy, a modular design that makes it easy to add new features in the future, discussion forums and commenting, as well as user management.

In the process, Abhijeet evaluated a number of possible CMSes, including Midgard, OpenACS, Xoops and Zope, all of which he covers in his presentation.

What I’ve learned from our migration process, as well as our own work implementing CMSes for a wide range of clients is that the best way to select a CMS or CMS framework is to start by identifying your organization’s requirements.

After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, any CMS will get you there.

When recently working in a distressed community in Philadelphia, we were thinking of the best ways to communicate what we were planning for the area and guide residents toward local resources that exist but are rarely used. As a cost effective solution, we worked with the Klip Collective to implement a video installation within a vacant storefront. The installation runs every evening. Besides providing some valuable information, we used the installation to instill some street activity along what was once an active commercial corridor.

Open source is not just about lowering costs. It’s about staying in control of your own data. For governments, it is important to specify open file formats for storing public data. Eric Kriss, Massachussets’ secretary of administration and finance asks an important question about long-term archiving of public documents created with Microsoft Office. “Will those documents still be legible 10 years from now, or in 50?” The state of Massachusetts has given some thought to that question and is taking action.

“Truly, the world is addicted to Microsoft Office. But beginning January 2007, the state of Massachusetts plans to kick the habit. That’s the deadline after which all documents used by Massachusetts state government agencies must be stored in open formats, according to broad technology plans issued by the state earlier this month. Currently, approved formats include PDF and OpenDocument, a free, XML-based office document standard used by several alternative office suites.”

“The move comes in response to long-standing criticism of the native Office file formats. Through the years, Microsoft has repeatedly manipulated the way Office saves documents, making sure customers always need the latest version of the suite to stay compatible.

Source: Kicking the Microsoft Office Habit, Computerworld.

Microsoft and any other proprietary software company is welcome to develop tools to work with open file formats. This makes it possible for proprietary software and OSS to compete on a level playing field.

The open source productivity suite OpenOffice.org uses the OpenDocument format. Is it any good? A recent review of OpenOffice 2.0 — not in some tech journal, but in the Chicago Sun-Times — concludes that OpenOffice is great alternative to Microsoft:

“…you won’t use it because you hate Microsoft or because you don’t like tying your whole office’s (or your government’s) ability to function to the proprietary whims of one single company. Maybe you won’t even use it just because it’ll cost you $0 to Microsoft Office’s $365. OpenOffice 2.0 is an attractive and compelling suite of office apps in its own right

…let’s not gloss over Open-Office’s choice of native file format, either. OpenDocument is itself an open standard, meaning that it’s 100 percent non-proprietary and any developer (including Microsoft) can write apps that support the format.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts feels so strongly about this sort of freedom and accessibility that it’s chosen OpenDocument as its official office format for both internal use and for public documents.”

It’s not a new idea. Peruvian Congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva talked about the importance of open file formats years ago. Now we have a state in the U.S. doing something about it.

…here comes Joomla. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of the Content Management System Mambo over the past months. Finally the Developers now left Mambo and started Joomla.

As this article in eWeek points out, “the original owners [Miro], wanted to regain control of the project. The developers, realizing that they were being cut out of executive management, decided to take the code and run…”

The outcomes might describe the state of open source today… [Quote from opensource.org:] “…For twenty years it has been building momentum in the technical cultures that built the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now it’s breaking out into the commercial world, and that’s changing all the rules. ”

The article in eWeek continues “…Open source is all about the Darwinism survival of the fittest program. Since Miro no longer has the developers, it and Mambo will die off. The rebels, since they’re the coders, will continue to develop whatever they end up calling their version of Mambo [now Joomla]. Their concerns, once the immediate fuss with Miro is over, will be other open-source CMSes like Typo3 and Drupal, not Miro.

– Chris Haller/Ken Snyder - Orton Family Foundation/PlaceMatters

Joel Garreau weighed in yesterday on whether New Orleans should (or can) be rebuilt. He’s always smart and readable; if you haven’t read Edge City you should go get it. It’s a brilliant, well-reported take on urban theory and how cities are changing. Anyway, here Garreau lays out the etiology of New Orleans’ ongoing demise:

Throughout the world, you see an increasing distinction between “port” and “city.” As long as a port needed stevedores and recreational areas for sailors, cities like New Orleans — or Baltimore or Rotterdam — thrived. Today, however, the measure of a port is how quickly it can load or unload a ship and return it to sea. That process is measured in hours. It is the product of extremely sophisticated automation, which requires some very skilled people but does not create remotely enough jobs to support a city of half a million or so.

The dazzling Offshore Oil Port, for example, employs only about 100 people. Even the specialized Port of New Orleans, which handles things like coffee, steel and cruise boats, only needs 2,500 people on an average day, LaGrange says. The Warehouse District was being turned into trendy condos.

Compare that to the tourism industry, which employs about 25,000 people in the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation and food sectors — some 5 percent of the city’s former population, according to the census.

New Orleans’s economy is vividly illustrated by its supply of white-collar jobs. Its Central Business District has not added a new office building since 1989, according to Southeast Real Estate Business. It has 13.5 million square feet of leasable office space — not much bigger than Bethesda/Chevy Chase, where rents are twice as high. The office vacancy rate in New Orleans is an unhealthy 16 percent and the only reason it isn’t worse is that 3 million square feet have been remade as hotels, apartments and condominiums.

I’ve been thinking for a while that cities are essentially machines for getting rid of water, something at which New Orleans has obviously failed. But cities are also machines not just for living (to mangle a Le Corbusier quote), but for making a life. I’m certainly not above having loved the touristy parts of New Orleans, but that city failed to elevate its people, and the people failed to elevate the city. You can’t rebuild something that hasn’t really been there for 100 years anyway.

A Los Angeles Times article titled “Web Proves Its Capacity to Help in Time of Need” documents the importance of the Web as a communications medium.

It reunited families and connected them with shelter. It turned amateur photographers into chroniclers of history and ordinary people into pundits. It allowed television stations to keep broadcasting and newspapers to keep publishing. It relayed heartbreaking tales of loss and intimate moments of triumph…

The Internet has played a larger and larger role in every major news event of the last 10 years…In the aftermath of Katrina, use of the Internet is more vital and varied than ever.

The Internet started out as military communication network designed to survive a nuclear war. What is striking is that today it is not the military or the government but rather ordinary citizens, media companies, and businesses that seem to come up with rapid, innovative, and effective ways to use the Internet in times of crisis.

What about the government? MSNBC reports:

…it turns out that to make a claim with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Individual Assistance Center, your Web browser must be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 or higher and you must have JavaScript enabled. It even says so right on the page itself. One problem: IE6 isn’t available for Macintosh or Linux computers.

This after years of Section 508.

Thankfully, to use one older technology you do not need to worry about operating systems, browser version numbers, and plugins. That technology is radio. The Los Angeles times has a good article on the role radio played in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina titled “A Lifeline Sent by Airwave”

In the early hours of Sept. 2, several million radio listeners east of the Rocky Mountains could hear the voice of a man on his roof in New Orleans describing what the stars looked like over a city in darkness.

The man’s voice sounded serene and mellow. At that moment, he was in total isolation — speaking from his rooftop in a city filling up with reeking water, SWAT teams and crowds of angry, hungry, frightened people.

No one could have gotten to him that night, and it is impossible to know whether he survived. But his voice was carried on the 50,000-watt signal of WWL-AM. He sounded close enough to touch.

Two stories in the New York Times’ science section today relevant to our game here. First, Dennis Overbye takes a historical trip to cities that died, here. Good bits:

“Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place,” said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University.

Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground.

What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth.

Overbye goes on to talk about Atlantis and Alexandria.

The lead item in the section, though, is the more optimistic (and editiorially brilliant) roundup of big-tech projects other cities are taking on to defend against nature. Salient bits:

London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic.

Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims.

Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede into history.

So let me say this about that: I live in the California Bay Area. My house is raised up about six feet above grade, because I live on what used to be a flood plain and what remains an area at high risk for liquefaction in a major earthquake. You know what liquefaction is, right? It’s when the ground, sodden with water, gets shaken to the point that the solids go into solution, and hardpack turns into quicksand. In the abstract, liquefaction is my third most favorite terrifying aspect of nature, right after pyroclastic flows and katabatic winds. But in reality, I would like my house to not sink into muck after the not-if-but-when quake that the Bay Area’s due for.

And after Katrina I have absolutely no faith that the local government or the Feds are anything approaching ready for that quake.

Residents of coastal cities: hang on to your hats and glasses. This here’ s the wildest ride in the wilderness.

Mapping enthusiasts are using Google Maps and Google Earth and other data to compile maps of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

One Web site, www.scipionus.com, is combating the confusion by encouraging users to annotate a Google Map of New Orleans with information about specific locations. Collectively, the community is creating a collaborative map Wikipedia. Anyone with something to add can enter a street address and leave a marker on the map at that location, providing a few lines of text about conditions at that spot.

In a separate effort, other Web users have also made use of satellite photographs of the region available through the Google Earth service, a program which allows users to view satellite photos as if they were flying over them, panning, zooming and tilting the image at will. While most of those photos depict the area pre-hurricane, the software allows users to “overlay” other photos and images. So more recent aerial photos–even pictures from news services and solo photographers–can be reshaped and dropped onto a satellite map, illustrating the current conditions.

[Source: Forbes - Google Is Everywhere]

On a related note, aerial and satellite images of disaster locations are available for free from ClobeXplorer.