Happy New Year

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. Check out our BCParticipate and BCVisualize tool sets.

As a partner in the Living City Block Project in Denver, we utilized our BCSurvey SMS (text messaging) tool to obtain feedback during a fundraiser held in Downtown Denver. The information gathered was useful in understanding who the participants were and how they might be willing to contribute to the project. The Living City Block team worked hard to conduct outreach and host a well attended event. It was key to capitalize on these efforts by gathering feedback from attendees and the BC SMS tool worked great.

Another interesting project is the Planning Boulder site. I attended meetings for the Boulder Comprehensive Plan update and was struck at how little many participants new about planning in Boulder. I felt it would be useful for the community to know what historical planning decisions were and how they may have effected the growth of the community. In this way we could make educated decisions about our future. In this light, I searched for resources on planning in Boulder and found a little here and there, but no comprehensive resource. Using my timeline tool, I aggregated the content I could find, as well as entered information from the Municipal Histories of Boulder to compile a history of planning in Boulder.There are over 300 events in the Boulder history timeline. Create an account to provide your memories, comments and thoughts. Together we can fill in the gaps and create a living, breathing account of our community.

Does Hyperlocal mean anything to you? Wikipedia has a more complete definition but to us, it is a tool for filtering relevant information for a small scaled geological area. It used to be that the availability and usability of data was a constraint. Just the opposite is true now. We have more data then we know what to do with. The key is having the tools to filter out the data you need. We are working on a hyperlocal site for the Goss Grove Neighborhood in Boulder that does just that, filters the information for the neighborhood. The site is in beta right now but you can take a sneak peak here.

I held a session this summer at the Colorado APA Chapter conference. The session, titled "Bridging the Gap - Bringing Web Based Tools to Planning", discussed open data and Gov 2.0, free visualization and mapping tools and mediums for public participation. A copy of the presentation can be found here. I have since given a guest lecture at the College of Architecture and Planning and will be teaching a class in the Master's program this Spring on Planning Data and Visualization. 

Lastly, thank you for a great year and check out our Night News Challenge application, "The Community Bee - Bringing People Together". Oh, and don't be afraid to like us on Facebook!

Happy New Year, Sarah