Comments on: Digital Placemaking – Authentic Civic Engagement

By: Inspiring reads, June 20th | Peter Dalsgaard

Inspiring reads, June 20th | Peter Dalsgaard — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 07:06:15 +0000

[...] Digital Placemaking – Integrating social media into placemaking practices at the Project for Public Spaces [...]

By: 7 Ways to Disrupt Your Public Space | Project for Public Spaces

7 Ways to Disrupt Your Public Space | Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:55:02 +0000

[...] a compelling alternative can also be used to get them plugged into their public spaces now. Using Digital Placemaking tools is a great way to reach people on their smartphones and computers (where they are) and engage [...]

By: Jesse Clark

Jesse Clark — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:41:00 +0000

I work for a community development corporation and am excited at the prospect of utilizing digital media to evolve the public participation process in planning. However, we inevitably run into the “digital divide” issue, where many of our low-income and elderly residents don’t have internet access.

Can you speak to how you address this issue in the communities where you implement the “digital placemaking” process? I’m concerned that if we assume that everyone has internet, in effect we are excluding a specific segment of the population from public participation.

By: Daniel Latorre

Daniel Latorre — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:01:00 +0000

We have an upcoming post about our offline+online work in San Antonio, I’ll post to your fb page when that’s up next week. Turning a place around always starts with a few committed people, passionate change agents using all means to raise support, I’m sure people will understand this better when they hear more stories of people in other areas who’ve made it happen.

By: Linda Plater

Linda Plater — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:08:00 +0000

Hi Daniel,

I think I am the local digital media talent although the programming is not my forte. I’m the online organizer. See facebook Park Lawn Pride for what I’ve been up to lately. We’d love to integrate the power of 10 or other tools. I am excited about it but buy-in from the non-techie people could be a challenge.

Would you mind replying to our FB page, for the record. Thanks so much for the encouragement!
Here is the link http://tinyurl.com/7naf7ld (Etobicoke, just north of Lake Ontario)

By: Daniel Latorre

Daniel Latorre — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:51:00 +0000

Hi Linda, we use our PlaceMap tool in concert with all of our methods of civic engagement, offline and online, so we don’t recommend using it in isolation. It sounds like you have the opportunity to do this in a holistic way, and if your budget is basically zero I would recommend finding local digital media talent to volunteer their time. The PlaceMap is totally Open Source, so any digital designer, programmer, along with a good online organizer (community manager) type can really run with this if you can recruit them to your cause. What area of Toronto is this in?

By: Linda Plater

Linda Plater — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:26:00 +0000

HI Daniel,
Linda here from Toronto. I am championing a revitalization plan for a 60 year old school yard that’s run down and underutilized. There are many stakeholders including low income families with no greenspace and high end developers with eyes to building more units. The closest usable track is 11km away and we want to make our field accessible and safe for all including some landscaping and an outdoor amphithetre. How can we use the Power of 10 to get all stakeholders involved? We have no budget to date so what are the costs of using this platform?

By: Daniel Latorre

Daniel Latorre — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:51:00 +0000

Thanks for sharing Dan, the timeframe you face is amazing. In the digital media world most projects are measured in months, anything more than 6 months seems "long", and in the urban planning world project timeframes can range from months to several years. The education of a person into an individual able to best realize their unique contributions is altogether more daunting, and more sacred. I'll take a look at your site. One thing you might find interesting too is the idea of getting the school system to adopt Placemaking methods like the Power of 10 to make each school and the area around it a great public place for the community.

By: danlatorre

danlatorre — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:31:00 +0000

Thanks for sharing Dan, the timeframe you face is amazing. In the digital media world most projects are measured in months, anything more than 6 months seems “long”, and in the urban planning world project timeframes can range from months to several years. The education of a person into an individual able to best realize their unique contributions is altogether more daunting, and more sacred. I’ll take a look at your site. One thing you might find interesting too is the idea of getting the school system to adopt Placemaking methods like the Power of 10 to make each school and the area around it a great public place for the community.

By: Digital Placemaking at Project for Public Spaces | tint.org

Digital Placemaking at Project for Public Spaces | tint.org — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:00:52 +0000

[...] months at Project for Public Spaces I’ve started up a Digital Placemaking practice, you can read my into post there to find out more on how I’m bringing Cultural Studies, Media Ecology, Open Government, and [...]

By: Dan Bassill

Dan Bassill — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:01:00 +0000

I’ve been a fan of mapping for nearly 20 years because of the potential ways maps can connect people in a geographic area and mobilize them in a collective effort. In my own case I’ve been focusing on helping volunteer-based non-school tutor/mentor programs grow in high poverty areas of Chicago. Thus, my maps show where poverty and poorly performing schools are located and where existing tutoring and/or mentoring programs can be found. Getting the information on the maps and keeping it current is one huge challenge when done from a small organization. There is great potential of crowd sourcing some of this information, but that offers a risk of not covering all the areas of the city where help is needed.

However, getting the information on the map is only the first challenge. Getting people to look at this information regularly, understand it, and then to act in ways that support the operations and growth of all of these programs for the 12 years it takes for each child to grow from first grade through 12th grade is a much more daunting task. I host a conference in Chicago each November and May to help keep this strategy alive, bring people together, and to help attract resources to the various tutor/mentor programs in Chicago.

I encourage you to browse http://tutormentorexchange.net to see what I’ve learned from trying to do this for so many years. I hope we can connect in some ways.

By: Your City, Your Map – The Ushahidi Blog

Your City, Your Map – The Ushahidi Blog — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:01:40 +0000

[...] a map to build open government and civic engagement, PPS focuses on digital placemaking by using “integration of social media into Placemaking practices, which are community-centered, encoura…While this year’s completion is complete, plans are already under way for next year’s [...]

By: Daniel Latorre

Daniel Latorre — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:10:00 +0000

Ed, thank you. About best practices, so far it’s about using the digital media in ways that best suits their nature: not being tied to time and place in order to participate. Digital Placemaking really becomes effective when you’re asking busy people from a larger area than is practical to engage with by face to face meetings alone. About making it work, the effort really is in the communications outreach more than the tools themselves, spending time to form and run an ongoing media strategy needs to be the majority of effort. More to come!

By: Ed Mullen

Ed Mullen — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:51:00 +0000

In future posts, what I’d be curious to know is what use cases are ideal for your approach? I imagine it is particularly good when you are dealing with dense, somewhat chaoticly planned/unplanned spaces with decent density. What is the critical mass needed to make it work? How are the variables tweaked project to project based of the particulars of the project?

By: Ed Mullen

Ed Mullen — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:37:00 +0000

Really great post. Looking forward to reading the future ones, and digging into the work and wrapping my head around all this. I like that the platform is a being refined over time. Really good stuff.

By: Fred Kent

Fred Kent — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:53:00 +0000

We think this tool will add a lot to our on-the-ground tools as placemaking becomes a broader campaign in communities or in cities as a whole.

By: Fred Kent

Fred Kent — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:53:00 +0000

We think this tool will add a lot to our on-the-ground tools as placemaking becomes a broader campaign in communities or in cities as a whole.