Shareabouts is an open source app from OpenPlans that makes sharing ideas on a map simple. Applications like this will make 2012 a year of more usable apps and better data for community decision making.
This past year, we’ve seen the growth of community decision making tools around planning. In my estimation, 2012 will continue this trend and bring more usable, integrated apps to the world of community decision making, giving planners and community leaders a broader and more efficient toolkit for engaging stakeholders in a decision-making process.
In the world of mapping, we’ll see more ways for people to easily contribute to maps about the places they live. These apps have been around for a while, but now they’re getting easier to manage and deploy. For example, our friends at OpenPlans have an emerging platform called Shareabouts (blog | git repo), that is open source and has a clean, usable interface. MindMixer just added maps to their web-based community idea platform, and these guys have given a lot of thought to user-centered design. These more usable apps will increase our ability to crowdsource relevant geographic data. The mapping interfaces of yore were pretty clunky, but this will be less the case in 2012.
In geographic decision making, we are ready to begin the conversation about how to build the next generation tools for communicating complex planning concepts with compelling visuals. The development of the Decision Commons platform, the acquisition of Procedural and their flagship product CityEngine by Esri (see our previous blog on this), and the work of Paul Waddel and his team on Urban Vision all point to this. We will also begin to figure out how to bring geographic decision making platforms (scenario planning) to people in their homes and on their smart phones. Desktop tools have been the mainstay of running geographic analyses on plans, but I think we’ll begin to see simple tools that run in the cloud that can do things like site suitability analyses, demographic trends, and utility usage estimates based on planning assumptions. 2012 will not be the end of the desktop in this regard, but the beginning of something really cool and transformational.
The overarching trend for me, while less sexy than crowdsourced geographic data, compelling visuals, and cloud and mobile geographic apps, will be the increase in data availability, creative apps that use that data, and increased interoperability and usability among the many tools for community decision making. At PlaceMatters we are looking forward to helping coordinate efforts to bring the benefits of open source and collaboration to community decision making. This will show up as a webpage for tracking and understanding the various emerging and existing tools available to communities, the coordination of code-a-thons and other events, and the continued efforts around open source planning tools. We look forward to the opportunities and challenges over the next year and invite anyone to join us in this conversation. Let us know what you’re working on and never hesitate to drop us a line.
