# Making cities easier to use

By [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://nickgrossman.xyz) · 2010-01-15

strategery, topp

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![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/51b3b6f2b1a8ff515a3fb38f802684df.jpg)

I always have a hard time explaining what we do at [The Open Planning Project](http://openplans.org/).  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](http://twitter.com/nickgrossman) 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](http://foursquare.com))
    
*   help people & volunteer? ([Ushahidi](http://ushahidi.org), [The Extraordinaries](http://beextra.org))
    
*   connect in real-time ([Twitter](http://twitter.com))
    
*   organize a team to make something happen, _right now_ ([Groundcrew](http://groundcrew.us))
    
*   find people who want to do things I want to do ([Meetup](http://meetup.com))
    
*   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](http://digifesto.com)'s brand-spanking-new [conjoint.py decision-making tool](http://bitbucket.org/sbenthall/conjoint.py/), which [OpenGeo](http://opengeo.org) has been using recently during its own tagline discussion. _// Photo of crumpled city map by Emanuele Pizzolorusso via_ [_MoCo loco_](http://mocoloco.com/fresh2/2009/12/17/crumpled-city-maps-by-emanuele-pizzolorusso.php)

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*Originally published on [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://nickgrossman.xyz/making-cities-easier-to-use)*