Cities.
Urban design, transit, civic tech, Open311, the city as internet
- FlightCar – a Beachhead for Car Sharing
Despite the extent to which I talk and think about car sharing and other newly possible. web-enabled modes of transportation, the truth is I still don’t use too many of them on a regular basis. Need to work on that. It seems as though I need to travel to SF to get the urge to get around town in new...
- NYC Taxis and Regulation 2.0
This week, the NYC’s black car association (limos and car services) filed suit to block the e-hail pilot that was set to begin today. The argument is that there has traditionally been a formal divide in NYC between taxis you hail on the street (yellow cabs) and cars you reserve in advance (black ca...
- Design, Policy and Infrastructure for Great Experiences
I consider myself an accidental policy person. In other words: I didn’t set out to study and understand how our policy decisions impact the world we live in. Rather, I came at it from the perspective of design and experience (both real world and virtual) and ended up backing into the policy implica...
- Making NYC Awesome
I am so inspired by Kid President. If you haven’t seen the video, go watch it now, and get your pep talk on. So… with kid on our shoulder, let’s think about how to make NYC more awesome. From a tech policy perspective :) A few weeks ago the (already awesome) NY Tech Meetup launched… Continue readi...
- Backing into your network
Today, we announced that USV is investing in Hailo. I am psyched about this for a number of reasons, but primarily because it’s infrastructure that connects people to their city in new ways. What’s most fascinating is that we almost certainly don’t yet know what those ways are. I want to point out ...
- Superheroes in the Snowpocalypse
Yesterday Uber made me feel like a superhero. It was about 10 degrees in Boston, and I was on the T on my way into Cambridge. And as we pulled in to Kenmore station the conductor notified us that all Green Line trains would be going out of service. So my train — and every… Continue reading
- Bureaucracy and Trust
Yesterday, I spent the day at a meeting on “city innovation” at Harvard’s Kennedy School, with 30 or so CIOs, CTOs, and other technology executives from around the country. I did a short presentation on predictive analytics and cities (slides here) — thanks so much to everyone who sent in comments a...
- Predictive Analytics and Cities
It’s been a big year for predictive analytics. I’ve been following Nate Silver’s blog on the election, and his deep data analysis cut through the noise, was consistent, and ultimately proved correct. And to look at another (eerily prescient) example, look at this 2006 prediction of what a major ...
- Community, and Why Halloween is the Best Holiday
I love halloween. I think it’s my favorite holiday. The thing that I like about it the most is that it’s one of the only days of the year where you have a reason to go out and meet all of your neighbors. I spent a while last night walking around the neighborhood with Theo… Continue reading
- Hurricane Sandy
It’s really hard for me to comprehend what happened in NYC last night. Everyone I know is safe and sound, and the overall death toll is amazingly low given the severity of what happened. But man, what a hit the city took. The aftermath is going to be long and painful. I was also blown… Continue re...
- The Taxi Business & Working for Sellers & Buyers
I am writing this from 30,000 feet on my way to San Francisco. I have a great car service which I use every week when I travel. This morning, I ended up having a long conversation with Reda, one of my regular drivers, about Uber and how it’s shaking up the taxi and car service business.… Continue r...
- Stuck on the Bus, or, Civic Engagement in a Networked World
Amazing things happen when people are stuck on a bus together. More on that in a bit. I spent yesterday afternoon with Chiefs of Staff and Chief Information Officers from about 10 US cities, at an event convened by the Harvard Kennedy School and Living Cities (a collaborative of large funders who fo...
- Jane Jacobs, Inspiration, and the Internet
Last night at 3am, our daughter Brieza started crying, Frannie and I woke up, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I crawled over into my office and started surfing the web. For about two hours, I wandered from thing to thing, and seemed to keep hitting gems, like this classic Paul Graham article ...
- Transportation Networks aka Bike Share is Awesome
An amazing thing happened yesterday. I was on my way into Boston to get coffee with Jason Schultz — from my house, I had ridden my bike the 2 minute ride to the Green Line T, taken it downtown, and had just gotten off at Hynes Convention Center. From there, it was to be about a… Continue reading
- cibi.me
The Civic Works team at OpenPlans just launched another sweet micro-site: cibi.me — for NYC’s forthcoming bike share program. The site is notable for a few reasons: First, it’s beautiful and fun to use. The OpenPlans team has been putting out a ton of these small, beautifully designed and really fu...
- Cities that Work Like The Web
Here are slides from a talk I gave at the Living Cities Strategic Forum on Technology and Civic Change. Continue reading
- Joining MIT
My paperwork went through today, so I can finally say it in public without fear of jinxing myself… I am proud and very excited to say that I’m officially joining the MIT Media Lab as a visiting scholar, through the Center for Civic Media. I’ve been coming here for the weekly lunches and research me...
- Next up at Civic Commons
We just posted this morning on the Civic Commons blog that our founding Executive Director Andrew McLaughlin is now moving on to take a totally awesome job atTumblr, and that I’ll be moving into the ED role at CC as of today. It has been great working with Andrew since Civic Commons launched in May ...
- Open, interoperable cities
The first CityCamp, in January 2010 was a memorable event for a bunch of reasons. It simultaneously marked the birth of several civic technology initiatives — the CityCamp unconference series itself, which has grown like gangbusters since then, Code for America, which has since just finished its fi...
- Digital Power Tools
This past week, I spent some time cutting a hole in the wall in between our kitchen and our family room. It’s a project we’ve been talking about for a long time, and we considered lots of different ways of doing it before we actually got down to it. We were concerned about the cost,… Continue readin...