Content about Information

Heading to New Partners, reading the program on the plane. like last year I’m awed by the roll call of speakers and the diversity of projects that are going on. It’s a way of keeping me honest about the role of technology in planning. More reminders that it’s always about people and places first, and tools second.
During the final session at the second Lincoln/Sonoran scenario planning tools get-together in October, I foolishly said that my first follow up from the event would be to go home and write a blog post. And here we are…
So what’s useful about intending to write a blog post? At the time, I thought (and still think) that think greater visibility for the effort was the missing piece. Over two days, we talked about the state of the art in scenario tools — mature desktop GIS-based products, new approaches with video game engines, parcel-based calculation engines, the lot. Proprietary, sort-of open, and completely open, all projects led by really smart people. As a scenario planning dummy myself, all very impressive.
And yet, the mindshare of these tools is still small outside the world of planning. Talking to non-planners (yes, occasionally), the existence, innovation, and value to society of the tools from the workshop is not understood. There are lots of reasons – these tools come to life in the hands of pros, backed by complex data, made sensible by nuances of configuration, informing long-term multi-juristictional other-hyphenated etc-etc etc. All true. We distrust models and modelers for good reasons, and not all large scale planning processes are engaging or convincing. And so on.
Visibility matters, because these tools can work on your phone. In your hand. Maybe not every tool today, but pretty soon. All the existing challenges and realities of scenarios still apply – caring about far horizons is still hard. But the dispersion of computing power and available data are opening a new entry point into this whole world. More interest brings in new skills, new tool builders with different backgrounds and approaches. Disruptive newcomers, or old-timers with new approaches.
Maybe the next generation won’t be building scenario planning tools in any form that we’ll recognize today. But it’ll be the evolution of the processes and tools we spent two fascinating days discussing in Salt Lake City last year.
(hat tip to Jason at PlaceMatters for getting a blog post up within days of the event…)

One of the diagrams generated during the meeting in Salt Lake City
I recently returned from a gathering in Salt Lake convened by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy and Sonoran Institute in concert with partners including us (PlaceMatters), OpenPlans, Fregonese Associates, the University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning (our gracious host), and Decision Commons. The agenda was ambitious but the conversations were deep and meaningful.
This convening (the Open Source Planning Tools Symposium) was just about 2 days of rolling up our sleeves and figuring out what it will take to move mature and emerging tools to greater use and refinement to tackle the greatest challenges of our day.  There were 36 people in attendance representing non-profits, regional and local government, scenario tool developers, private firms, and universities.
Part of the agenda included working on edits and recommendations to a Policy Focus Report on this topic that will be published right around the National APA conference by Lincoln with contributions from OpenPlans, Sonoran, PlaceMatters, Decision Commons and Fregonese among many others helping with edits and filling in gaps.  Additionally, this group talked about a range of topics to really advance this effort into the next year.  These topics included ways in which university curricula could prepare planners with scenario planning skills, data standards and interoperability among tools, sample work programs for regional support, indicators for social equity, and developing clearer approaches to linking planning needs to available tools.
The group was action oriented and very excited to keep the work going before another convening sometime next year.  We will continue to support that conversation using the Open Source Planning Tools Ecosystem (OSPT-Ecosystem) Google Group.  If you are interested in getting involved, feel free to join the group and peruse previous notes from our calls.  Materials will also be available online that came out of this meeting and we will want to engage a broad and deep network of people as we move this effort forward.
On a personal note, I am very excited about all of this and this has become my “extracurricular” work for now as we figure out how to build out the Decision Lab’s capacity to support open source planning tools and scenario planning practice across the country.  We will be building a basic page on the PlaceMatters’ website as a hopeful precursor to something bigger.  Check back for that soon.  This will be a place where you can learn about the ongoing activities and events related to Open Source Planning Tools and will eventually have a compendium of open source tools.
If you have a perspective on how open source can improve planning tools, let us know on Twitter or below in the comments.  More results and documents will follow, so check back on our blog or sign up on the Google group to stay up to date.

Free online workshop on the practical use of social media and web-based tools hosted by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (TRB) will feature panel discussions lead by experts and interactive breakout sessions.