Making cities easier to use

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 people I'm usually met with blank stares. I don't mean to dig on TOPP -- a lot of effort went into writing that tagline, and believe me, earlier versions were more abstract and less punchy. Prior to this current version, we had a different tagline: "Virtual tools for real-world change." That's what our t-shirts still say on them, and I don't mind it. It has a skyline above it, implying a connection with cities, which I like. But still, I don't think we have a compelling enough elevator pitch -- a description that doesn't take five minutes and a walk-through of our org chart to explain. So recently, I've been trying out something new. I'm experimenting with the following explanation:

(standard disclaimer) "We're a non-profit software company; yeah, it's a bit strange, I know." "We build software that makes cities easier to use. You know, like, making it easier to get around, to interface with your government, and to connect with your neighbors."

This morning, I tried this on a friend at the gym, and I got an "Oh, cool! You mean like public transportation? My friend in Seattle was telling me about GPS on buses there -- how come we don't have that in NYC?" Bingo. So, I'm going to test this out a little more. Making cities easier to use. I like it. I just updated my twitter description with that; we'll see if anyone notices. To get a little more specific, here are some of the questions I think we're trying to answer that fall under this larger goal: How can we make it easier to...

get around? (ideally by foot, bike, or transit)
interface with government? (who reps me? who supports me? how can I help? how can I be heard?)
connect with neighbors? (who lives on my block? what do we have in common? how can we help each other?)
be involved in shaping the future? (combining the two above: connecting with neighbors and interfacing with gov)

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to make a city easier to use, that lots of creative projects (many of them NYC-based startups) are already addressing: How can we make it easier to...

connect with friends? (Foursquare)
help people & volunteer? (Ushahidi, The Extraordinaries)
connect in real-time (Twitter)
organize a team to make something happen, right now (Groundcrew)
find people who want to do things I want to do (Meetup)
and on and on...

Given all of these questions and more, it's highly likely that Making cities easier to use is still too broad; but there's no question that it's easier to explain, which is a start. And for those of you struggling with similar issues of tagline-choosing, see Seb's brand-spanking-new conjoint.py decision-making tool, which OpenGeo has been using recently during its own tagline discussion. // Photo of crumpled city map by Emanuele Pizzolorusso via MoCo loco

I spent most of this morning looking back through old posts about the Chandler Project and OSAF. I've thought about this a lot, due to the many parallels with my work at The Open Planning Project. For newcomers, those parallels are:

Massive funding from a visionary with a dream (in OSAF's case, Mitch Kapor, in TOPP's, Mark Gorton), where that dream may not always be perfectly articulated;
Rapid staffing around an open source project attempting to satisfy that dream (OSAF's Chandler to TOPP's OpenCore / ~~OpenPlans~~ CoActivate);
Due to both of the above, a propensity to expand scope and broaden the potential market(s).

Since Dreaming in Code (the book chronicling the story of Chandler and OSAF) was published in 2007, Kapor has stepped away from the project and pulled his funding. Through 2008, OSAF operated under his funding, but with a scaled down staff (10 down from ~25). Long story short, the project failed to get enough traction and was just too expensive. There has been lots of commentary about why this happened, so I'm not really attempting to describe anything new here. For my own understanding, though, I want to jot down the takeways that seem most relevant to my work at TOPP. Here's what it seems that OSAF couldn't do, and what I'm hoping to do at TOPP Labs: Choose one market to start with, and satisfy it fully. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore describes a (high tech) market as the following:

a set of actual or potential customers
for a given set of products or services
who have a common set of needs or wants, and
who reference each other when making a buying decision

According to Moore, it's the last one that tends to hang people up -- it's not a market unless the members reference each other. In other words, you need to focus. In his "beachhead" (aka D-Day) strategy, he advises putting your full effort into your initial market segment, generalization be damned, and satisfying other users with what's left over. If there aren't any real constraints, create some. If embrace change was the mantra of the XP movement, and embrace constraints is the mantra for web 2.0 startups, then perhaps introduce constraints to create change should be the mantra for over-funded tech non-profits. Some constraints that are particularly relevant in this case are: target market (see above), team size, project scope and timelines, and if all else fails, funding. Granted, it is difficult (but not impossible, IMO) to introduce other constraints when funding is plentiful and reliable. Don't get too academic, OR, let the market drive your decisionmaking. This is perhaps just an extension of "constraints", above, but I think it's worth mentioning separately. Looking at the way Things (team of 2 devs) and OmniFocus (experienced sofware entrepreneurs) ate Chandler's lunch, it's clear that there was a failure in the product development process. While the Chandler team was debating database infrastructures and making endless product spec notes in their wiki, Things brought a simple, usable product to 1.0 in just over a year. They didn't have the luxury of lengthy debates; they needed to get something out there, get people using it, and get feedback. Since their 1.0 release in January 2009, they've steadily released relevant updates based on real feedback. Can you be market-based and constrained in an open source environment? I think so; it just required leadership and understanding of these factors. It could be argued that Chandler wasn't able to implement these kinds of changes because of its open source nature and collaborative process, but I believe that it's possible (and this has been clearly demonstrated) to maintain market focus and constraints in an open source project. So, now that we've got that straightened out, it should be smooth sailing, right?

February 5, 2009

TOPP @ Green Desk

This week, TOPP moved into additional, (maybe) temporary office space, to alleviate some of the crowding at our office in the West Village. We were looking for a place that was convenient, comfortable, and most of all, available immediately (backstory is that we've been basically sitting on top of each other at our W. 12th Street offices for the last few months, while our new space at 148 Lafayette is being renovated -- it's ridiculous, I know...) Anyway, we found a GREAT space at a new-ish office incubator in DUMBO called Green Desk. It's a renovated 6-story warehouse building right at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. Each floor consists of a bunch of glassed-in offices which are home to various companies. Gothamist is on the floor right below us. Most of the folks from the Livable Streets Initiative and GothamSchools, and some of the OpenGeo team will be working from here now. I've been reading and thinking a lot about office space lately, mainly spurred by our own impending move as well as Fog Creek Software's recent move to new digs. Having read Joel Spolsky's writing about the importance of private & quiet office space, I've been getting a little concerned about the open plan of the office we're about to move into. I visited the Fog Creek offices last Friday for their new office open house, and was impressed by the combination of highly social space (kitchen, lunch tables, couches) and super-quiet workspace (private, glassed-in office for every single developer). As a result, we at TOPP have been trying to subtly improve the layout (within reason, since construction is about to start and our concerns aren't the only ones -- the space will also be the future home of Tower Research Capital) of the new office to increase the amount of available private/quiet space, even if the floor plan is fundamentally open. Anyway, I digress. So, I'm sitting here at Green Desk for the first time today, and it's really quite nice. We can hear the sound of the subway rolling over our heads as it crosses the Manhattan Bridge, but it's kind of like waves crashing and isn't really disturbing. We have four separate glassed-in rooms, each with about 4 desks, and there's a shared conference room, kitchen, and sitting area. Apparently there's also a proper cafeteria and exercise room on the way. It's also nice to be in a space with other companies, although I haven't met anyone just yet. Here are some photos. Even though I will continue to work primarily from the Manhattan office, I think I'll plan to spend a day or so per week down here for a change of pace, and for the joy of walking to work and not leaving Brooklyn :)