Monthly Archives: March 2011

PlaceMatters Blog Roundup: March 30, 2011

By Jacob Smith | Published: March 30, 2011

I had a week off because of a few conferences in Washington, D.C. (including the terrific Nonprofit Technology Conference) and then an unplanned week away from the office as a raging wildfire threatened my town (we learned some great lessons about communication, community, and social media – I’ll blog about that separately), but I’m back [...]

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What to do When Public Participation Goes Terribly Wrong?

By Ken Snyder | Published: March 23, 2011

In 2009 we worked with Ron Thomas, Mary Means, and Goody Clancy to help plan and run a large 500+ person visioning event in the town of Shreveport.  We set up the event the night before with computers at every table for brainstorming and a keypad polling system providing each participant with a handheld device [...]

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International Making Cities Livable Provides Conference Presentations via “eConference”

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: March 23, 2011

An FYI Post: The International Making Cities Livable Conference was held in Charleston, SC in October of 2010 and focused on Planning Healthy and Child-Friendly Communities.  Conference organizers are making the presentations from their set of presenters (including some pretty big names in planning and urban design) available as an “eConference.” You have to register [...]

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Data Smorgasbord: IBM’s City Forward

By Jocelyn Hittle | Published: March 22, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeZ6Sgu2Pu8& I’ve recently blogged a couple of times about scientists measuring attributes of cities and some of the interesting correlations and predictions that can come out of those measurements.  Jacob Smith recently alerted me to IBM’s launch of City Forward, an online tool that contains large amounts of information about 55 cities–including traffic patterns, health [...]

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Matthew Baker of ESRI talks GeoDesign

By Jason Lally | Published: March 21, 2011

While at New Partners for Smart Growth, I had Matthew Baker of ESRI show me a couple of neat tricks for sketch based feedback in ArcGIS.  Using a series of free add-ins and some customizations [link forthcoming], he is able to get some nice feedback directly inside ArcGIS.  He does this using a Wacom DTU [...]

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iPad 2 Faceoff: Best Buy and Apple Store Showdown

By Jacob Smith | Published: March 15, 2011

Anticipating long lines and limited supply, and believing we’d increase our odds of both scoring a new iPad2 on Friday afternoon when Apple kicked off sales of its latest toy, we split up. Turns out we were wrong – the limit was only one device at Best Buy – but we both made it home [...]

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DIY touchtable technology integrated with GIS

By Ken Snyder | Published: March 14, 2011

This Fall, PlaceMatters broke new ground in the application of our DIY touchtable integrated with CommunityViz and Brainstorm Anywhere. On Cape Cod, we used 4 tables simultaneously to enable a “where do we grow” exercise with 4 teams. With the touchtables, participants were able to add jobs and housing and changes in transit services directly [...]

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PlaceMatters Weekly Blog Roundup: March 8, 2011

By Jacob Smith | Published: March 8, 2011

Bill Gates at TED uses collapsing state budgets as a launching point to make the case for improving civic engagement, while National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation simultaneously asks if better conversations can help solve those very same budget crises. NCDD goes a step further, in fact, and challenges dialogue and deliberation professionals to “come [...]

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Lessons From Ecosystem Approaches to Planning: PlaceMatters Releases New Report

By Jacob Smith | Published: March 2, 2011

PlaceMatters’ new report, “Bridging the Divide Between Science and Planning: Lessons From Ecosystems-Based Management Approaches to Local and Regional Planning in the United States,” has a mouthful of a name but a straightforward premise: even in scientifically based planning efforts, politics matters. Our report examines six ecosystem-based planning efforts across the U.S.: the Mission-Aransas Ecosystem [...]

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