Blogs

It has been an interesting year here at BalancedCommunity and we are looking forward to an exciting 2012. Here are a few of the things that kept us busy in 2011.

I started off the year taking on one of many new challenges - teaching a class a CU Boulder. The class was titled "Geodesign and the Web" and had a mix of undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Architecture and Planning. Here is a short description of the class: "We are living in the information age. Everything we do generates an information shadow. Data is being collected, presented and acted upon in real time. The scale of online participation has increased by orders of magnitude. In this world of exponential growth on the web, the skills required to collect, process and share information have become integral to success in a broad range of careers. This class will cover techniques and enabling technologies for collecting, processing and sharing information. At the end of this class you will have the skills to efficiently find the information you need, analyze it, tell a story with it and share it on the web in a user friendly format."  Overall, while challenging, it was rewarding to work with the students and to help them develop technical skills to support their careers. I also provided a series of guest lectures in the Master's of Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Colorado at Denver.

This last semester I taught a class at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The class was in the School of Architecture and Engineering and was titled Geodesign and the Web. While I covered a lot of topics, including gathering data from the web, web 2.0, social media, mapping and visualization, one of the ones the students showed the most interest in was Agile Software Development. While it may seem weird to teach agile software development methods to a group of architecture and planning students, I had my reasons.

There are several resources that I have found useful in the last year, particularly in relation to helping my students understand various concepts and tools. This is an eclectic mix of sources provided by a variety of industries. The widespread use of internet technologies today means that many industries are using the same tools and learning from each other. In particular, the below sources represent journalism, politics, technology, non-profits and research.

I recently attended the 2011 Boulder Economic Summit. While there were multiple interesting speakers, the keynote presentation featured Dr. Richard Wobbekind, Economist, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado. Dr Wobbekind presented the outlook for the national, state and Boulder area economy. Below are some highlights from his presentation. 

Nationally, the recovery is taking hold in the private sector however the underemployed need to become fully employed before we start seeing a decrease in the unemployment rate. Looking forward the unemployment rate is a lagging indicator of the economy, however consumption growth is rising. There are several risks to keep any eye on, including the housing market, oil prices and transportation costs and the bond market. 

Season's greetings and best wishes for a Happy New Year from the BalancedCommunity founder. We are looking forward to another great year and want to share with you some of our accomplishments in 2010. First and foremost, I officially formed BalancedCommunity on February 18th, 2010. My goal was to take a new approach to Urban Planning through the use of innovative tools and applied technologies. To this extent, we have developed three new tools, as well as implemented numerous others in planning projects.

I made it back from Black Rock City in one piece, despite the 20+ hr drive home! Since I was last there in 2003, a few things have changed but the overall atmosphere of community still exists. The sense of community at Burning Man comes from an element of acceptance and of survival. You are not judged for material things, you simply get to be who you are. Feeling welcome and comfortable breeds a sense of community. You also get a feeling that everyone is in it together. You are all exposed to the 100+ degree days, the 40 degree nights and the whiteouts.

It seems the world has caught on to the power of interactive online maps...and what a great thing it is! Interactive maps provide a platform for displaying complicated data in a simple format. It used to be that mapping required the purchase of expensive software AND hours of your time training yourself to use it. Even then, the software created static maps that lost a lot of the functionality and usability provided by interactive maps today. Now there are all kinds of programs that bring mapping to even the most untalented of users at little to no cost. I decided to compare some of the free programs available. For each one, I imported Boulder Residential Sales data which I already had formatted for my time series mapping program.

I have been to Burning Man four times now. My first trip was in 2000 and it was on the tails of the Telluride Tech Festival. At that time, urban planning was  mostly an unfamiliar term to me and the fascination of Burning Man came mainly in the art and the people. It did not occur to me that a mass experiment in planning was taking place. The planned capacity of the event in 1998 was 9,000 people and has grown to over 50,000 now.

There are a lot of GREAT Free tools out there mostly thanks to open source software development. Thank you to all those contributors! I thought I would share a few tools that make my life easier. These are in no specific order, and are by no means the only ones available.

Jing captures anything on your screen. It is great for taking screen shots, or to create a how-to video. Jing was a life saver for me when I needed to teach my mom how to use her wordpress sight while I was in Boulder and she was in Tucson. If any of you have ever tried to explain blogging to their parents, then you know what I was up against. So, I recorded my steps with Jing and said what I was doing while I was doing it. Then I sent her the short step by step video. It worked great and she can replay it when she gets lost.

I have followed the use of key pad polling for years and can appreciate what it has done for public meetings. Participants are allowed to answer questions anonymously and the audience can see the results immediately on the screen. However, I find the hardware is expensive and participation is limited to those attending the meeting. In keeping with the mission of BalancedCommunity, I decided to provide a public participation tool that is more accessible and usable than key pad polling.