Hackable City: Providence

This caught my eye when it turned up in my alumni newspaper. Dan Schultz’s idea for combining hyperlocal and traditional journalism sources isn’t unique, but the Knight Ridder Foundation’s initiative to find and seed fund the next generation in news is.

Assembled quotes from Carnegie Mellon Today

Schultz brainstorms with his classmate Ian Anderson to develop an idea of a news-media Web site, one that would allow users to pull up a screen and draw a circle around any town or region on a map. From within a circle, the Web site would return all relevant news stories.He also envisions all those returned stories coming from an eclectic group of sources: mainstream media, citizen journalists, Web logs, and Web news systems—like a search engine for news crossed with global
positioning system mapping technology. In his proposal, he describes a one-stop shop for all news, local and global, where users can define what types of stories are important to them.

The Knight News Challenge was prompted by concerns about the newspaper industry’s future, says Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer for the Knight Foundation. Newspaper subscriptions are down, and advertisers keep leaving, Kebbel says. The Knight Foundation created the contest, expecting that futuristic, workable ideas could result to continue the beneficial impact that newspapers have had for many decades. Some of the benefits he cites have been binding a community together, identifying problems, and rallying solutions through good editorial pages.

Schultz’s funding is for him to “blog” about the idea through spring at www.pbs.org/idealab. With input from the blog, he hopes to develop his idea more fully until it addresses all of the complexities of a
“user-contributed” news system. He plans to talk with anyone who has ideas to improve a news media system, including journalists, bloggers, and consumers.

 Some fellow travellers and I have launched Mashable City, described briefly below. If Hackable City is about claiming our identity in a community, the convergent Mashable City is about creatively using information about ourselves, our relationships, and our environments to give us and others a lens on that community.

Mashable City is an open community project, aimed at turning Providence, RI into the most mashup-friendly place on earth.

We’re a loose collective that aims to aggregate and organize the city’s information into open data services, setting the stage for a wealth of mashups that will increase the connectivity and social capital of all Providence residents.

We’re just getting started, and there are a lot of things we need to think about.

• What kinds of mashups would you like to see?
• What kinds of data services do we need to set up to make them possible?
• How do we involve as much of our community as possible, to make sure we’re building what’s right for everyone?

We have our ideas, but we want to hear from you, too. Please, join the conversation in our Google Group and help us build the Mashable City.

We’re getting popular around the NY Times. Here’s a recent feature article from the Real Estate section featuring Buff Chace, Bert Crenca and the emergence of Downcity. I think Bert is doing a great job preventing Downcity from becoming a monoculture, and I really look forward to his new building and the hacker space within.

Not that its exactly hackable, but RISD|Works gets a nice mention in the New York Times travel section this week. Many RISD grads are front-and-center on hacking the urban community in new and interesting ways; close enough for me.

Selling housewares, jewelry, fashion accessories, books and other gifts, the shop carries the work of RISD (pronounced RIZZ-dee) alumni and faculty. This is no standard university store, since the school, founded in 1877, has graduated the glass artist Dale Chihuly, the film director Gus Van Sant and the fashion designer Nicole Miller, among other notables, and had innovative faculty members like the Cuisinart inventor Marc Harrison.

I’m a sucker for trying to find valid crossovers between virtual worlds and our real world, where the interplay adds to our face-to-face interactions, rather than simply sucking us into our computers.

Along these lines, I had a great chat with Eric Gordon from Emerson College today, who is shepherding an experiment in Boston called Hub2. They are using Second Life environments to reimagine poorly designed public spaces in Boston, then using that to fuel discussion between citizens in the real world. Check it.

Hub2 strives for a Boston where all residents take control and ownership of their neighborhoods, enlisting digital environments and networks to strengthen real-world spaces and relationships. Hub2 invites community members to collaboratively imagine, articulate, and assert a vision for the kind of neighborhood they wish to inhabit. We use appropriate technology to facilitate that visioning process and as an amplifier for grassroots voices articulating their common dreams.

From the City News interview series…

Young Apprentices Get a Year to Seize Their Future Careers

In August, when most graduating students have moved on from school, are off looking for jobs in their field, preparing to enter college, or relaxing on a summer vacation, a group of young Providence pupils, ages 18 to 24, just received their diplomas on Wednesday, August 1st. Daniel Yem, 23, who came from South Philadelphia to Providence, is one of the twenty-two new graduates of the Year Up program.

The Year Up program, started in Boston in 2002, is a one-year intensive education and apprenticeship program for young, urban adults. It has branches in New York and Washington DC, and in 2005 the program came to Providence. Located downtown, Year Up’s Executive Director Sara Enright believes that in the next five years, thousands more students will transform both the City and the nation by closing what she calls “the opportunity divide” between our youth. She believes that the combination of intensive training and real world work experience in a corporate setting helps bridge that divide while building America’s future workforce. [Read more →]

Best Places just named their top ten cities in the US for block parties, and Providence ranked #5. I’m not sure how valid the research methodology was, since it was sponsored by a group of BBQ-centric consumer brands, measuring “the frequency and importance of block parties to the community.” But the point is well taken, that block parties build ties between neighbors and social capital.

The sponsors, mealstogether.com, offer a downloadable block party starter kit.

This reminds me that National Neighborhood Day is coming up on Sunday, September 16th. Time to get that block party or neighborhood clean up event planned !

Hackable Idea of the Week has been on a bit of a hiatus, but a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition caught my ear.

Across the country, citizen-run guerilla drive-ins are springing up in municipal public spaces and vacant lots. A loose collective of folks puts together a showing of a movie projected outdoors on the side of a building, and invites other people to show up. Primarily an urban phenomenon, the drive-ins have an anarchistic edge, with loose organization, word-of-mouth promotion, and an emphasis on reclamation of public spaces with spontaneous activity.

Here in Providence, Cornish Associates, an urban development company, has been running movie nights on Thursdays during the summer, without the self-organized subversive construct of the Guerilla Drive-Ins. Still, props to them for being a catalyst.

Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive in offers a DIY guide to starting your own.

NPR’ story on the Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive In.

From the City News Interview Series…

GENS Community Building Director Ronnie Young: “The only way we’re going to be able to build a livable, comfortable neighborhood is by getting out there and talking to your neighbors.”

26-Year Old Ronnie Young of the Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services (GENS) knows what it’s like to “Celebrate Providence” and his neighborhood, beyond their popular annual community festival. Ronnie, a Providence-born community builder, knows that underneath the festivities and camaraderie lays a strong foundation paved with an everyday, patient effort to rebuild his community one neighbor, and one home, at a time. [Read more →]

Some folks in south Providence have started a grass-roots organization called Citizens for Resident Permit Parking (CRPP), to advocate for a resident parking permit that allows overnight parking on the streets.

Its unclear yet whether CRPP will position itself as a traditional petition and advocacy group, or harness some hackability principles to influence and craft a new-and-better parking approach with the city. The website uses citizen-captured photos of “creative” (and illegal) parking approaches to get around the current overnight parking ban, as proof that the current policy is not working. [Read more →]