Urban Planning in the 21st Century

Over the last few months the new CRC-SI 2 has been kicking into motion and positioning itself for the research areas the new program will be looking to achieve. For those who have been involved no doubt you are aware of the history of the CRCSI but for those who are not up on the current lingo, the CRCSI is short for the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information and ‘2’ is the second round of funding that the organisation has received from the federal government.

With this second round of funding the CRCSI will be able to work for the next seven years around the theme of Spatially Enabling Australia. The core research areas are Positioning, Automated Spatial Information Generation and Spatial Infrastructures. See this handout for more information.

As part of the CRCSI 2 work programs there are a number of application areas that will also be looked into and one has stuck my interest. The Sustainable Urban Planning (program 4.5 pdf: here) organisers recently held a seminar on the subject of Greyfields.

“Greyfields are the ageing occupied residential tracts of suburbs that are physically, technologically and environmentally obsolescent……..typically found in a 5 to 25 kilometre radius of the centre of each capital city”‘ Professor Peter Newton.

With population growth, affordable housing and increase need for better government spending the rejuvenation of these areas of urban living must be proving a great challenge. What I feel will be key for this research theme is the engagement of community on urban planning as it was highlighted that within ‘greyfields’ most of the land is under private ownership. This proves an interesting sticky point for redevelopment in light of current issues.

As housing affordability and population growth are hot topics and that urban sprawl is becoming more and more unsustainable the greyfields are key to helping address these problems. In another session I attended recently titled ‘Boom Town 2050’ it was highlighted that the density of dwellings in Australia is not at the levels it needs to be to support population growth. Hopefully with research, engagement with community and importantly action the use of spatial within this area will be seen as critical to realising and communicating what needs to be done.

Moving Away from Gov Silos

A few days ago the Rudd government posted it’s response to the Gov 2.0 taskforce report on Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0. The responce, hosted on the Department of Finance and Deregulation (DFD) website can be found here.

Reading through the response I am pleased in most aspects of the Government wanting to take action in the area of making more data available to the public and generating tools that will help inform and direct new policy. The steering committee that will be setup to help direct the DFD is for the better part entirely made up of federal government agencies. This is my first bane of contention but more on that in a sec.

Some things to note coming out of the report included:
- Defining what Public Sector Information should be
o free
o based on open standards
o easily discoverable
o understandable
o machine-readable
o freely reusable and transformable.

- Establishment of metadata standards to improve sharing, reuse and discoverability of PSI. All well and good and there are standards that can be adopted although a focus on how custodians can easily manage metadata and update it needs to be high on the agenda.
- The creation of an ‘Gov 2.0 Awards’ that will recognise outstanding practice in the use and impact of Gov 2.0 tool to improve agency and program performance. Nice idea although will this lose focus on the bigger picture of interagency collaboration and the overall reduction of duplication across government? I hope the awards will take into account those agencies who without producing a big wondrous application get into the nitty gritty of creating a more efficient government.

In addition the adoption of creative commons should greatly increase participation and use of the data. I will say that while using creative commons is great though needs to go into how a custodian can still assure correctness where required.

There are two area’s that I am a little disappointed in:

1. The Gov 2.0 response to the report (and even the original report itself) gave little recognition to state level data and local government level data. Much community interaction happens at this level, more so at the local government level and so I feel more thought and support has to be focused in this area.

2. The steering group for Gov 2.0 looks to be entirely formed out of federal government agencies giving no thought to private industry (who will be supplying and even building the web2.0 tool to support government), academia and the citizens who will be the beneficiaries of the openness of Gov data.

If Government is really going to get on with Gov 2.0 then we need to realise that the world extends beyond government and so to be proactive around the use of PSI data then we need to engage with those who might get best use out of access.

With more and more governments pushing towards open access to data such as the UK data.gov.uk and the US data.gov portals we need to take our lead from these portals and look at what we can implement to ensure a Data.Gov.Au portal becomes a success. Catalogs, Web Services, Download realms are a good start but let fully embrace what the term “2.0” is supposed to represent and ensure that a good user interface sits with the portal that makes access data easy and useful.

App My State: Victoria

It is no surprise to see that more and more application creation competitions are popping up all over Australia in response to the global push to release and access more public sector information (PSI). Victoria is the latest state to launch a competition for innovative application that showcase the best use of PSI data.

Map My State (http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/app-my-state.html) launched by the Premier of Victoria in late February is designed to run for 8 weeks and award prizes based on youth, sustainability, popular choice and an open category.

The Mashup Australia and Apps4NSW competitions proved to be quite popular (Apps4NSW is still open for those interested:
http://www.information.nsw.gov.au/apps4nsw) although one component that sets the App My State competition apart from the rest is hidden in the terms and conditions where only Victorians can enter. Still that hasn’t deterred me from trying (being from Western Australia) and one can only hope that the organisers of this competition realise that idea’s can spring up from anywhere and still benefit Victoria.

Personally I like the idea of open innovation and how these ideas to be tested amongst the public in an open forum. Mobile applications, the web, interaction and social networking are the mediums where new information is quickly released and facilitates a very smart path to reaching critical mass. These competitions have even pathed the way for new innovative businesses to take advantage of this push for open data. Kaggle.com.au is an example of an innovaive business structured around this style of competition. Data has to go somewhere doesn’t it?

The change we have seen in this industry over the last 2 years has heightened the core element of “location” and its importance to how information can be accessed and integrated creating a common understanding. Visual interpretation of information via maps has allowed a large audience to grasp the understanding and meaning of data and how it relates to the day to day life of you and me.

Let’s face it; the public are the ones who would get the most use out of information so it will be interesting to see what this competition brings us.

Simple Interface + Rich Content

The Government 2.0 Taskforce “Mashup Australia” Competition closed some time ago and roughly 2 weeks ago the winners were announced. I have held off commenting on the winning applications due to work and a little bit of gloominess in that my help in a submission only rated 3 stars. (http://mashupaustralia.org/mashups/locate-me/)

The number of entries to the Mashup Australia competition attracted 82 entries ranging from web page mashups to mobile applications. Some were complicated and others were simple to use. A favourite of mine was the ‘Meat in the Park’ (http://meatinapark.appspot.com/) application which quite simply allowed you to find a public BBQ and invite friend so you can have a picnic. Very simple interface, rich content and specific outcome.

The winning application, the Suburban Trends mapper http://www.suburbantrends.com.au/ showed that with a little bit of effort and a focus on user design that a complicated application could be quite simple to use. This application, like so many others combined Australian Bureau of Statistics data, location services and other datasets and presented this in map form. The application took the mashup approach one step further and applied dashboard style indicators to give the user a quick overview of their desired area. Not unique in the approach although commendable in the layout, colours and use. Certainly something for all of us is to think about is the intended audience and their technology prowess (or potentially lack of). They say you only have 8 seconds to grab someone’s attention on a website so the aim is to get it right and this application gets it right and better yet it was developed by a student!

With the push to open data policies and location aware data, a very significant mashup utilised typically non spatial data and combined this with location to produce ‘In Their Honour’. This mashup is dedicated to the service men and women who fought and died for Australia by allowing the user to search for their final resting place. http://mashupaustralia.org/mashups/in-their-honour/

A very powerful mashup that is easy to see why it won the peoples award.

I commend all entries to the Mashup Australia competition and with the Apps4Gov awards in NSW and other competitions that are springing up all over the place 2010 seems to be moving towards to social mapping/media space. With data access on the increase, content and rich content is at the fingertips for anyone who wants it. The challenge moving forward is to utilise the data in such a way that makes it easy to find, use and interpret!