Building Things

I’ve been reading Steven Johnson‘s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  It’s an enjoyable read, in large part because of Steven’s ability to draw connections across seemingly unrelated subject areas to tell a unified story.  I’m only about halfway through, but in...

I’d like to make an addition to my internet wish list for 2011: a Strategic Networking Tool.  Here’s what I mean: Online networks of all kinds are very good at telling you who you’re already connected with.  Who your friends are, who your professional contacts are, etc.  This is great, but it’s all ...

Last night, I attended an event at Harvard about the Knight News Challenge, put on by Hacks/Hackers Boston and the Knight Foundation.  The room was full of people who are interested in applying for the News Challenge grant program.  I was there to talk about our Knight project, OpenBlock, specifical...

I opened my talk at last week’s Times Open event with this little video plugging Phone Idol.  It got a few laughs, which was the point, but unfortunately no new songs sung just yet.  Derek Gottfrid from NYT made the great suggestion that I print up some stickers and put them up in… Continue reading

At OpenPlans, we’ve hired two new Project/Product managers within the last month. I couldn’t be happier with the hires, and they are already doing great work.  Jeff Maki is handling our work with public transit agencies (like the OpenTripPlanner and our shiny new real-time bus tracking project with ...

We are starting up several projects right now at OpenPlans. As a first step, we are setting up project management infrastructure for each. You would think that being a 10-year-old software and media company, we’d have rock-solid, time tested, perfectly smoothed out techniques for managing our projec...

At OpenPlans, we’re busy signing up new clients for our products & services, and we’re also spending a lot of time fundraising (from individual donors, foundations, etc.).  As such, I’ve been thinking about how we pitch our organization, and have recently spent some time over the past few days readi...

I love music, but I am really bad about keeping up with new stuff.  My iTunes library is only so-so, so I spend most of my time listening to playlists on 8tracks.  This is good for variety, and great for finding the right background music for a BBQ or party, but there’s something missing: my… Contin...

After many moons of plotting and scheming, yesterday we announced our organizational rebranding: The organization formerly known as The Open Planning Project (or TOPP) is now OpenPlans.  I am excited, and I think this is a welcome development. For years, there has been mass confusion (chaos! pandemo...

A few months ago, I did a short interview for the Engadget Show on the state of real-time bus information here in NYC.  The interview was for a video segment which led into a live interview with the reporter I worked with, Rick Karr.  The whole episode is now available online.  Before our section is...

Thank you so much to everyone who helped us think through our re-name of TOPP Labs yesterday.  Your feedback and insights were absolutely invaluable to our process. After a long night and day of deliberations, we’ve settled on our new name. Drumroll please… (and this is obviously unnecessary since i...

For the past year or so, the group at TOPP that I manage has been known as TOPP Labs.  TOPP Labs was originally chosen not because it was the best or most compelling name, but because as we were dialing back work on the OpenCore project, we needed a name that was better than “The… Continue reading

At work recently, we’ve been exploring the idea of integrating voice and/or SMS into our applications.  Much of what we do has to do with people responding to their physical environments — their neighborhoods and the streets and public spaces that constitute the bulk of our public experience. So, I ...

I always have a hard time explaining what we do at The Open Planning Project.  The front page of our website reads: “TOPP is a catalyst.  We empower civil society through software, media, and smart urban policy.”  While this makes sense if you think about it for a while, when I first say it to… Cont...