Elizabeth Goodman's Talk: "Created by everybody: Engaging participation with mobile interfaces"

her website: confectious.net

Notes from the talk:

What is a city?

• Q: What is a city
• A: That depends
• A: relatively denser
• A: relatively more diverse
• A: relatively more built up
  • (than the surrounding areas)
    • Las Vegas - middle of nowhere, extreme example
• A: Well, it's complex.
  • A: It's the architecture
  • A: It's the topology
  • A: It's the economic relationships
  • A: It's a web of personalities
  • A: It's a set of attitudes

Detroit: a city that does not change well

A Ladder of Citizen Participation

Manipulation (at the bottom) -> Citizen Control (at the top)

• Information is only power when coupled with reaction
• Consultation is only useful when it is used

"The government is not the city"

Chantal Mouffe

Agonistic Pluralism - Democracy is not harmonious Agonizing is not a bad thing (Antagonism?)

David Wilcox

Participation is peripheral (unless there is a big threat or opportunity) Negativity takes center stage. When things work, we don't notice.

• Note: avoidance/lack of action is sometimes an action - but you leave everything open to interpretation

Online Activism

• txtmobs
• FaxYourMP
• iCan
• Community Fixits
• meetup.com
• moveon.org

New York 311 - unified NY metro city information

Each call gets a unique ID for tracking Like 'bug reports'

Physical space usually trumps digital space

• Digital amplification does affect this
• Service for representation... pay someone to show up in person for you?
• Easy access phone -> database/forum service? Memetic?

Mobile interfaces

• Often bug-tracking metaphor
  • Parkscan.org
  • city-scan.com
  • fcny.org/cmgp/comnet.htm

Meta-data neighbornood naming

Schaumburg

• wants low income workers, but don't want traffic due to worker influx, and also *don't want low-income housing!
• Agonistic Pluralism! Internalized agonistic pluralism?

Community cleanup bounties? (My own thought)

• Offer bounties to normal citizens to fix community problems

Success?

• There is no website for cityscan that shows problems that were fixed...
• so was the website successful, or only symbolic?

"All politics is local." - Tip O'Neill

Consider professional gripers

• do they monopolize things?
• One guy around Golden Gate park in SF keeps getting events cancelled.

Once a metric is *stated*, it dominates.

• Solution: come up with a 'better metric'?

Don't make your goal to stop the complaint.

• City thinks about larger city
• Community thinks about community
• Atom, molecule, organism, community - full circle.

My questions:

• We have core technologies that are giving us lots of capability already
• But what sorts of technologies could exist in the future?
• What should we be developing to enhance this stuff?

Long term planning is better, but harder to motivate

• "it won't help me now"
• Fair enough: we want our efforts to help us, too
• So, we must enable long-term planning while still considering short-term solutions.