Thursday, July 14, 2011

Open Government Forum at Internet Week NYC

Over the next couple of days I am going to post summaries of Internet Week sessions that I attended last month. Here is the first, a panel on open government in NYC:

In June, I attended a panel on Open Goverment in NYC, hosted by Time Warner as part of Internet Week NYC. I joined my friend, Queens Community Board 3 member, Tom Lowenhaupt, who has been advocating for a .NYC top level domain for over ten years. Given some of the road blocks he has faced in his campaign, I knew attending an Open Government forum with him would be interesting.

Presented in a panel format, the event focused on Setting the Digital Standard for open government. NYC Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith introduced Jesse Hempel, a senior writer for Fortune Magazine, who moderated a panel of experts in government information technology including:

  • Adam Sharp, CEO, Twitter
  • Carol Post, Commissioner, NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT)
  • Rachel Sterne, Chief Digital Officer, NYC
  • Seth Pinsky, President, NYC Economic Development Corporation

Commissioner Post opened with a brief description of the city's plans for a digital roadmap, including a range of web 2.0 tools that allows the City to to communicate and join with citizens to make a better city, break through hardened boundaries between people, neighborhoods, agencies, etc. "The fundamental responsibility of government being to allow access to information," she said.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Conversations with Richard Saul Wurman

I was having a nice conservation on Monday with my friend, journalist Amanda Robb, about topics that floated in interesting ways from pitching social awareness campaigns to women's magazines to the role of Twitter and other social media in reporting. The conversation got me thinking about the two different angles that we approach our respective careers in media: she with the words and stories and publications of a journalist and me with the technology platforms, codes and administration of new media operations that bring those words to the world.

So what a treat to find out about Richard Saul Wurman's newest venture, the WWW.WWW Conference, which will celebrate improvised conversation.

Simply pairings of amazingly interesting individuals prompted by a question, generating a conversation. For 10 minutes to 50 minutes. And so it will go – conversations interlaced with threads of improvised music. An astrophysicist & a microbiologist. An actor & a playwright. A jazz musician & a classical one. An energetic exploration of the lost art of conversing.

WWW.Wow. Where else could you find TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, Yo Yo Ma, Herbie Hancock and ESRI's Jack Dangermond all in one place? It's the WWW.WWW Conference, currently planned for September 18/20, 2012.

WWW.WWW will be a gathering of the greatest, most interesting & curious minds in the world engaged in immersive & improvised conversation. It will celebrate the 21st century while drawing attention to the new patterns & convergences effecting our health & that of our planet.

A unique un-conference that pairs up incredible minds for brief chats in a single venue. No presentations. No schedule. Just 100 interesting people and 50 conversations.

Richard Saul Wurman, who also founded TEDMED and the eg conferences, and coined the term "information architect" in 1976, is himself a M.Arch graduate who has been exploring the themes of design and place and livable urban environments since the sixties, so it is fitting that ESRI president and fellow mapping pioneer, Jack Dangermond should host the conference. You will recognize other great names associated with the event incuding glass artist Dale Chihuly, who will create an installation for the event and SEED Media Goup's Adam Bly as Science Curator. SEED was an original creator of what was to become my all-time favorite MOMA show, Design and the Elastic Mind.

The event will be streamed live to multiple locations and the talks will also be available via a yet-to-be-released, multi-platform tablet application.

Watch http://www.thewwwconference.com for details.

I won't want to miss the conversation, so I've already added it to my calendar.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Blog migration in progress

I am in the process of consolidating some of my writings into this new Blogger format. As much as I love the integration, flexibility and ownership of a self-hosted WordPress blog, I have been finding it to be increasingly a chore to update my installations. So much so that I've lost track of my words, which I promised myself I would never do, choosing instead to leave them as guest postings and collaborations on other people's blogs, websites and the ultimate sinkhole of discussion lists, Facebook and Twitter.

So here it is, the simplest, no-brained solution I could find, with no upgrade headaches, and a fun theme (that I might just tweak a bit here and there - I can't help myself).

While I'm gathering my musings and reports from the various ends of the internet (seems I was quite prolific in 2004 when I took a course on blogging), please visit some of those aforementioned websites:

http://gismonyc.blogspot.com
My blog for GISMO, a New York City meetup group for geographic information system professionals in the Tri-State area. I've been involved with this wonderful group of people for nearly 20 years in what used to be called Virtual GISMO. Many GISMO members are the unsung mapping heroes of Pier 92 during the aftermath of 9/11. We're developing a retrospective panel for an upcoming technology conference, which will probably mean more writing in my future.

http://iainstitute.org
I write the news, calendar items, Annual Reports and Salary Surveys for the IA Institute, an international community of people involved in the design and structure of information spaces, where I also serve as Operations Manager on a consulting basis and Mentoring Coordinator for the pure joy of it.

http://realestatevaluation.wordpress.com/
I occasionally collaborate on articles, research reports, GIS, and data visualizations with real estate valuation expert, Jim MacCrate of MacCrate Associates. I've worked as an editor and WordPress admin for the weblog, Real Estate Appraisal and Valuation Issues, and have served as editor and co-contributor for Straight from MacCrate, which appeared as a column on Miller Samuel's Soapbox blog.

http://www.west104garden.org
I'm the website committee chair for the West 104th Street Community Garden and write or edit most of the news, event and research pieces.

Now to go hunting for those words.

I Joined Google+ Today

I appear to be a late joiner to Google+, if the list of people in my contact's circles are any indication. It appears to have pulled my info from LinkedIn and has features of Facebook and a very interesting what if discussion among designers going on. I expect it will be a similar experience to LinkedIn and Facebook, perhaps with less of the silliness of Facebook but with similar features, such as Circles which lets you categorize people into groups. 

Just like Facebook, only better.

I've always liked that Facebook lets you group people. It's so natural. I tend to get frustrated by LinkedIn's degrees of separation - you are either in someone's network or you have someone or a chain of people between you and the other person. In a way this is nice because you are still able to contact people in your second network while preserving how you know that person (so and so's friend). Without a grouping feature, once you accept a person to your network on LinkedIn, you lose information about how you are connected to your new contact, unless you go to their page to see shared contacts.

Circles makes Google+ more personal and organized than LinkedIn. It is also more spare, sort of like the defunct Facebook Lite, but I'm witholding judgement for now. Facebook ended up dropping its Lite feature, and I suspect Google will eventually add in Facebook-like distractions and ads, since advertising is their ballywick.

If you are interested in learning more, let me know and I'll invite you to my Circle.