Building Things

This week, we launched the new, improved GothamSchools.  GothamSchools is the latest media / advocacy initiative from The Open Planning Project, and our first foray into the world of education.  We’ve got a great team of reporters in Philissa Cramer, Elizabeth Green, and Kelly Vaughan, and the new s...

For a while now, I’ve been using Chandler to keep track of my to-dos.  Chandler is a semi-historic open source project which I’ve been following ever since I read Dreaming in Code (and in many ways, it’s saga parallels ours at The Open Planning Project with our work on OpenPlans)  I’ve been rooting ...

In doing some photo hunting for a side project, I came across this gem of a photo on Flickr. Riding the subway all over the city, I often think about the fact that most great subway moments (and many great city moments, for that matter) go unrecorded. Perhaps this is part of the beauty of… Continue ...

In the spirit of blogging all the cool stuff we’re doing at TOPP, I’d like to announce the launch of a new website: Park(ing) Day NYC. Park(ing) Day is a global event, originally conceived by awesome SF-based arts collective REBAR, where for a single day, regular parking spaces are “leased” for use ...

Bastille Day on Smith Street is one of my favorite days of the year.  It’s great fun: the streets are closed, sand is trucked in, and a giant Petanque tournament is held.  But the tournament is just an excuse to be there: the real fun is the great food & drink put out by… Continue reading

Over at The Open Planning Project, we’ve always had a bit of a hard time explaining what we do.  That job just got a little bit easier, with the launch of the new-and-improved TOPP website last Friday.  Reactions from within the staff have been remarkably similar: something along the lines of “Phew,...

A few months ago, I wrote up a simple javascript photo gallery viewer for a side project, so I thought I’d offer it up to the world. It’s unobtrusive javascript, and it takes a simple list of photos and turns it into a slidey slide show. It’s built on top of the Ext Javascript Framework,… Continue r...

I stumbled upon SmartyPig this week while looking through the Happy Cog website, after reading a Zeldman post, linked to by Daring Fireball, which was brought to me via Melkjug. Gotta love the blogosphere. Now, after all that, not only do I have a new Favorite Web App, but I have a new bank. My… Con...

For the past several months, my coworkers and I over at The Open Planning Project have been hard at work on an important redesign and new product launch. I’m now excited to say that the final launch is, ahem, days away.  Streetsblog and StreetFilms have been hugely popular since they launched two ye...

(ok, I obviously need to work on less cheesy headlines, but for the moment…) On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of accompanying TOPP’s latest hire, Kim Wiley-Schwartz, on a pilot session for her new Livable Streets curriculum.  She’s developing an education program around Livable Streets that’s debuti...

Here at The Open Planning Project, we are currently looking to add to our talented design team.  If you’re a web designer with visual design talent, rock-solid production skills, and a strong intuition for user experience, we want to hear from you.  Download the full job description. Life is good at...

Elizabeth Press over at Streetfilms has been producing awesome stop-motion animations recently. The latest: Diverter. This short video shows how diverters can be used to redirect traffic flow and make intersections more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists. This is a great follow-up to Clarence Eck...

One of my colleagues at The Open Planning Project, Sebastian Benthall, has started blogging over at Digifesto. Seb is one sharp cookie, so keep an eye on this blog for lots of great web gems — the blog will be focusing on “how the internet and open source software can be used by civil society… Conti...

Over the past two years, I’ve redesigned this website about 5 times, but never finished. Talk about frustrating. Eventually, I realized that I was getting nowhere, and that instead of a redesign, what I really needed was an undesign. So that’s what I did. Welcome to wrkng -1.0, my first undesign. La...