COMMON GROUND: A NEW APPROACH TO CITY PLANNING
03.31.2010 // by: Alison
Tomorrow is a special night-time presentation of City Share featuring Michael Hendrix, the co-founder and former creative director of the Chattanooga-based sustainable design company Tricycle Inc.
Michael Hendrix is a location director and associate partner at global design and innovation consultancy IDEO. In addition to leading the Boston studio, he contributes creative direction and brand strategy on projects ranging from counter-culture apparel to OTC drugs to luxury home goods. Michael believes that the best brands are built by a system of networked experiences, from strategic planning, to the manufacturing floor, to consumer interactions. Tomorrow night, Hendrix will discuss his beliefs and methodology regarding community and design.
IDEO takes a human-centered approach to community design, fueled by the belief that the power of community is stronger than that of a single individual, organization, or brand. Beyond the physical, cognitive and emotional factors of design, they foremost consider the social factors, asking questions and evaluating answers: How might the user’s relationships influence or motivate behaviors? How might an experience be shared with others? What is the meaning of belonging, and of identity? What drives the feeling of membership or loyalty to a bigger cause or group? These questions inspire a new dimension of design that they bring to digital experiences, brand strategy, workplace design, urban planning, and beyond. Human-centered design harnesses the power of many to create experiences that are shared, co-created, and take on a life of their own-design for and by the users.
Michael will be introduced by Nick DuPey, a former Tricycle designer who now owns and runs the design and screen-printing collective Young Monster.
Please join us for this special night-time presentation, from 7-9 pm on Thursday, April 1 at CreateHere. Light refreshments will be provided.
If you missed last week’s City Share with Clay Shirky, watch it here.
STAND RESULTS AVAILABLE APRIL 12!
03.25.2010 // by: Alison
We’re so very pleased to announce that data from the world’s largest community visioning effort will be publicly available on April 12, 2010! All 1.2 Million+ thoughts pulled from over 26,000 Stand surveys collected in the summer of 2009 will appear in a searchable database, making this invaluable information dynamic and customizable. Our countdown widget will be keeping track of every second until 12:00 AM on April 12th, so you don’t have to.
The back story on this information is as follows: The Center for Applied Social Research at UTC coded the data pool, and then the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies analyzed the entire set, pairing it with relevant information from State of the Chattanooga Region Reports. After nearly a year of hard work by everyone involved, Stand is ready for delivery.
Making the data public doesn’t necessarily make it accessible, however. To help users parse the results, Stand’s team has built several search capabilities into this site, including zip code, neighborhood, theme, question, and respondent’s demographic information when available.
In the coming months, champions in the community will also be taking Stand on the road. Look for presentations, printed collateral, posters, billboards, and community roundtable discussions, all focused on how we can best use this information set.
We’re excited, y’all!
PPMRN CONFERENCE FOCUSES ON COMMUNITY DATA USE
03.11.2010 // by: Elizabeth
Elizabeth Crews is the Community Outreach Coordinator for the Ochs Center of Metropolitan Studies. As an invitation to the 2010 Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Conference, she discusses the ways that public performance measurements can be useful to anyone interested in addressing community problems.
On March 18 and 19, the Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Network will be holdings its third national conference right here in Chattanooga. The conference—co-sponsored by the Ochs Center—will be an opportunity for scholars, practitioners and concerned citizens from around the nation to meet and discuss how performance measurement and reporting efforts can improve both government performance and quality of life.
For the last five years, with support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ochs Center has been working with local governments and community based organizations throughout the nation on issues related to local government performance measurement.
If you work with or for local governments, the Chattanooga conference is an opportunity to hear from national thought leaders on successful efforts to use metrics to drive better management. But part of the reason that we are co-hosting the conference is because we believe that non-profit and community based organizations can play a critical role in working with government partners to both collect data and use it to diagnose and solve pressing problems in communities.
In other words, this is about public performance measurement and reporting – not just government performance measurement. One person’s performance data may be another person’s community indicators. Besides, sometimes the best way to keep government upright is to lean on it from all side and often times community organizations, local foundations and United Ways – the partners of government who increasingly are relying on data to make decisions on their own investments – are among the best leaners.
I hope you will take a look at the conference schedule and consider joining us. It should be a great conference at an affordable cost.
Also, with generous support from the Sloan Foundation, the Ochs Center will be able to provide certain registration and travel subsidies for non-profit organizations.
For conference registration, click here. If you are interested in further details, please check out the PPMRN website or contact Elizabeth Crews at ecrews [at] ochscenter [dot] org.
THE CONTRIBUTION REVOLUTION
03.10.2010 // by: Alison
Stand is pleased to announce Clay Shirky as the March 17 City Share speaker. Described by TED.com as “a prescient voice on the Internet’s effects” who “argues that emerging technologies enabling loose collaboration will change the way our society works,” Shirky will be speaking to Chattanooga via video chat next Wednesday about the concept of “The Contribution Revolution.”
In addition to teaching New Media at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, Shirky’s consulting practice focuses on the utilization of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. He explains his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations as being about “what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures.”
In an, interview with Jon Lebkowsky, Shirky speaks to the importance of including people at all levels of engagement: “Very often really large-scale collaboration, whether it’s a Wikipedia or Linux or what have you, involves a small number of people who care an enormous amount, and then a large number of people who only care a little bit, but who are participating, who are adding their value to the overall work product.”
Stand believes that participation is paramount to community change, which can’t begin without people speaking up, standing up, and standing together. Clay Shirky’s innovative thoughts on online group formation can help guide the ways we connect around Stand results—in real time, online and in the spaces in between.
Join us Wednesday, March 17 from 12-1 pm at CreateHere for broad insight, Lupi’s pizza, and thoughtful discussion with this internationally renowned social theorist.
If you plan to attend, please RSVP to blair [at] chattanoogastand [dot] com.
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