After many moons of plotting and scheming, yesterday we announced our organizational rebranding: The organization formerly known as The Open Planning Project (or TOPP)
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After many moons of plotting and scheming, yesterday we announced our organizational rebranding: The organization formerly known as The Open Planning Project (or TOPP)
As of 11am this morning, buses in Brooklyn are telling the internet where they are. And I'm proud to say that our work is behind it. For the past several months, we've been working with the MTA on this one-line pilot, to demonstrate that it's possible to achieve a workable bus tracking solution using existing hardware (in this case, farebox computers that will be rolled out citywide soon + GPS device + cell modem) and open source software (in this case, the excellent OneBusAway). The hope is that this approach can work city-wide, and for a fraction of the cost of other approaches. There is lots of good coverage out there in the blogosphere, particularly over at Second Avenue Sagas, which did an in-depth look prior to the launch, as well as a follow up post-launch. You can also read our official reaction to the launch on the OpenPlans blog. On a side note, in anticipation of some amount of attention related to the MTA launch, we also put up a new OpenPlans Transportation website today, showcasing our services and projects in the transportation space. It's nice to finally see the business that we've been building for the past year take a bit more shape. I really love this photo -- it is a huge honor to have something we worked on (in this case, the screen shot of the map behind the mobile phone) featured on an honest-to-god MTA transit ad. That is super geeky, I know, but as a lifelong New Yorker and transit rider, it's pretty cool. Now, as Jeff Maki, our project manager for the MTA project, said on his way out of the office today: time to go to bed and dream about buses moving on a map... // photo: Ben Kabak on Flickr
For years, there has been mass confusion (chaos! pandemonium!) around our name. Our emails were @openplans.org, our website was topp.openplans.org (until 2009), and our name was the Open Planning Project. To top it off, for several years, we ran a separate web service called OpenPlans (now under new management as CoActivate). As I've mentioned before, I've never been comfortable with these conflicting brands and identities, and I'm psyched that we've finally made the leap.
Here's a quick look into where we ended up, and how we got there.
First, we've updated our logo. Designed by the spectacularly fabulous Andy Cochran, it's similar to our old logo, but with cleaner lines and more meaning. It probably goes without saying, but we've got the "O" and the "P" in there, and the shape is a broken circle, evoking open processes:
For comparison, here's the logo that we'd been using for the past year or so. In order to minimize confusion between OpenPlans (the service) and The Open Planning Project the organization, we spent most of 2009 using our organizational nickname, TOPP, more prominently in our identity. While "TOPP" is easy to say and remember, as with most acronyms, it's pretty meaningless on its own. I'm sure it will take us a while to erase TOPP from our vocabularies, but I think it's the right move.
To round out the logo history, here's the one that was in service through 2008. I like it, however for the twenty- and thirty-somethings in the room, "OPP" means something a bit different (can you say "harm me with harmony"?).
Of course, to go along with the rebrand, we've updated the OpenPlans website, attempting to streamline our messaging along with our logo & brand. We've been struggling with a meaningful, succinct tagline for quite some time, and for now have settled on "We make cities work better." A while back, I wrote about the idea of "making cities easier to use" -- since then, we've taken that idea and adapted it a bit. Making cities work better is a better representation of our intentions, as it's multi-directional (i.e., we're not just "using" cities), and it hints at the digital infrastructure that we're building. Also, for the first time, I think we've successfully articulated how our software development, technology strategy and journalism activities are connected, as part of what we're calling "the new civic infrastructure." Lastly, a major goal of the redesign was to make it more clear what we do and how people can work with us. I guess now we just sit back and wait for the contracts to roll in... Here's what the website looks like today:
And for another trip on the Wayback Machine, here's a look at 2009:
2008:
and 2007:
That's it. Hello, OpenPlans. Nice to meet you.
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, now I can finally tell people what the heck it is we do here!'. Kudos to Vanessa, Jackie and Cholmes for distilling a lot of information about our various projects and goals into something remarkably coherent. I'm proud to work at TOPP, and now I have somewhere to point people when I want to show it off :)