I am a technologist. I build things with ones and zeros. They are built for the warm, loving, compassionate folks we call humans. I live in a city with lots of educated folks, folks who work in technology, folks with lots of degrees, and folks without degrees that are really smart, creative and innovative. This is Santa Cruz.
We have a problem. We can’t talk to each other as a community. We have no commons. We need to be able to convene as a community and build solutions for our problems. We need information so we can make informed decisions and be in action around issues that are important to us.
I’ve been working towards a solution to create the space in Santa Cruz that I call a digital heart. I received a Knight grant to create a platform so public radio stations could be part of this digital heart. For many reasons, it is clear to me now that the heart is bigger than one organization, bigger than one radio station. The heart is the digital geo-space that is Santa Cruz.
Some really bright folks at the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute recently presented a comprehensive report about the information needs of a community. I call it the food pyramid of information needs. We need a better information diet in our local communities. We need this diet in Santa Cruz now.
I have my beefs with Santa Cruz “issues”. I haven’t figured out how I can have an impact to make a difference with these things. But they sit with me, like an itch I can’t scratch. Each of us has our own list of issues we carry with us, things we wish would change, but we don't know where to start. I believe that a better information diet will vastly improve our ability to create positive impacts. Here's a sampling of some of the things that have bugged me over the nine years I've lived here ...
Why isn’t Santa Cruz a better walking City?
It’s appalling to me that we have real, vibrant, bustling communities (Homeless Center, Tannery, Mission Street Corridor) without out safe pedestrian access to the business districts. Raise your hand if you’ve been horrified when you see folks cross River & Highway 1 as cars fly by at 50mph? Have you seen a homeless mother and child cross the street? It makes me nuts. I fear for their safety.
How about the Santa Cruz River Walk? That would be the San Lorenzo walkway that runs behind the Ross/Petsmart shopping center. It is a vast wasteland that could be teaming with pathways, bikeways, landscaping, vendors, and vibrancy seen along other city river walks around the country. What happened here? Better yet, what could we do to make this different?
Hey, did you know that crime is up 40% since last year?
Psst .. that said 40% increase ... more precisely it is 41% ... seriously dude, seriously. Crime happens in Santa Cruz, it’s been happening all year and it is increasing over last year at a rapid pace. Look for yourself in this report
Life, Liberty and Broadband?
Recently there has been a rash of conversation about coffee shops around Santa Cruz providing (or not) wifi access to customers. Frankly, I think the conversation is focusing on the wrong provider. I dream of a day when Internet access is ubiquitous; like electricity and water. However, I cannot conceive of why I would place this burden on my neighborhood barista. Make me a great latte – yes! Responsible for my “right to broadband” no!
Finland has recently made broadband access a legal right. That is a compelling idea in my mind and one that has the potential to provide the universal access that we so desperately need. I know there are folks working towards this in Santa Cruz. How about we bring in that conversation to the heart?
Let's take a look at the City of Santa Cruz, General Plan 2030.
I look at this document and wonder how I can absorb it’s 208 pages and make sense of it. Thankfully, the fine folks at IBM created an open source tool that lets me do a deep dive into a document. I scan looking for terms that describe things that are important to me. Here’s a count of terms important to me in order of frequency:
- 240 - Community
- 78 - Open Space
- 58 - Pedestrian
- 29 - Health
- 27 - Education
- 18 - Technology
- 14 - Children
- 7 - Crime
- 2 - Internet
- 1 - Broadband
Hmm, so I’m thrilled to see community with 240 occurrences, yet I’m mortified by the vast distance between open space at 78 and Internet at 2. I love the open space we have in Santa Cruz (as I love the open space movement by the same name). But don’t we already have it? Maybe we should dedicate a bit of planning in that thing we don’t have … universal broadband access? Then once we have city-wide access, we need to make sure folks have data and information available to them. Hey, like everyone should be able to see how city planning and documents line up with their wishes and dreams for the community.
Thump, thump, thump
That’s the sound of your community heart. You love Santa Cruz. You love the ocean. You love the weirdness and the creative spirit of this city. You care about what happens here, you care about the health and vitality of your life, your children’s, your friends and neighbors. Let’s get that heart online.
We need passion, we need geeks, we need designers, project planners, and strategists. We need to be in action and we need to build. Maybe we host a series of hack-a-thon weekends, a barcamp like CityCamp, or simply make it happen in our own Santa Cruz way. I’m confident we can figure that one out. But it is going to start as a digital barnraising.
Who’s in?
Which date can you make?
Saturday, November 14
Saturday, November 21
Sunday, November 22
Saturday, December 5
Sunday, December 6
Leave your name (twitter name too please) in the comments ... we'll keep you posted on a date. We'll plan for four hours and come out with an action plan with future events and heck, maybe even little application or mashup :)
Let's do this thing!
UPDATE: There's a lot of moving and shaking going on with this thing :) I've gotten a host of responses over email and twitter in addition to the comments below. the date IS SET for Sunday, December 6, 2-4pm at Nextspace.
Margaret, you're doing what the Design Center was intended and should be doing - but you're taking it to the next level and including everyone, not just creative professionals. You're absolutely right that the next level of the digital community includes access to information - but it also involves participation. It's no accident that history has been made by crazed revolutionaries, psychotic dictators, and megalomaniac emperors. If you're not acting, then you're acted upon. In a true democracy it has to be far easier, far more natural, and more far reaching for individuals to become involved in the communal decisionmaking process than simply putting a cross in a box every other year. I can't make December 5th (Museum of Art & History event) but the 6th would be great. Or whenever. "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried." Winston Churchill.
Margaret,
Really interesting stuff. I am still trying to get my head around what exactly this looks like. Is it an eGovernment initiative, is it a marketplace for gathering the existing data that is out there, is it a forum for community action, or a combination of everything? Then how do you control the scope while trying to be inclusive?
I guess I will find out at the meeting;).
@jcrow
Margaret, I can make Dec 5 and 6.
I'd like to go over Cruzio's plans for broadband, as well as some public interest information and discussion initiatives which are already underway.
Thanks, Margaret. As you know, I have similar feelings. There's a really huge set of opportunities for savvy geeks and committed community & City members to design a more effective, living, sensing, and optimized civic data-structure for Santa Cruz. Consider the service platform that would emerge from a fully connected and instrumented city...
In the Information Economy, the most valuable core asset is data. Whereas power increasingly accretes around controlling access to data, innovation & resiliency increasingly builds around opening access to data. Collect good data, structure it and normalize it into RDF/XML, slap an API around it and open it to 3rd party devs.
And FWIW, I *did* read the 208pg General Plan 2030 and there is effectively zero awareness of the city's data shadow communicated in the document. While I applaud the efforts of the Plan's authors in meeting the established challenges of our community, I implore them to extend their awareness of local resources to include the realm of internet- and device-mediated transactions that have become so critical to our functioning.
Some additional thoughts of mine... http://www.urbeingrecorded.com/news/2009/08/19/city-planning-embrace-you...
@chris23
Friend - you can always count me in on your awesome ideas. GREAT post and I love how you are thinking!!
Any of those dates work for me too. Make it happen!
Hand raised here. At the moment, any of those dates would work.