San Jose, America’s software center, recently turned to a University City-based business to harness the power of the Internet.
The need: A way to supercharge public participation in the city’s efforts to create a 30-year master plan.
The solution: Wikiplanning, an on-line process for gathering public input.
The results: Almost 5,000 people – 90 percent of them under age 55 - completed surveys on how their city should grow.
“As an urban designer myself, I have had the same frustration of running public meetings where not many people show up, and when they do, they tend to be old white guys,” says Wikiplanning’s creator, Deb Ryan of Ryan Harris.
“I don’t discount their input at all, but we want the diversity of input to reflect the diversity of the community – race, gender, age – and employing web 2.0 technology can allow that.”
Though relatively new, Wikiplanning has been used on projects as diverse as light-rail station design for the NoDa arts district in Charlotte and the Carolina Thread Trail in Cleveland County.
Now Ryan and her husband, Mike Panveno, are working with University City Partners to gather public input for a master plan and area plan for University Research Park.
Ryan says the goal of Wikiplanning is to simulate a public meeting but make it available on line to a much broader, younger audience than attends most planning events.
For example, visitors to Wikiplanning.org who enter the appropriate password can hear greetings from UCP Executive Director Mary Hopper, read and download information about the park and master plan, complete a brief survey, write extensive additional comments and invite others to take part as well.
Visitors also can read all the comments – more than 60 so far - written by others.
Panveno says the San Jose comments eventually stretched for hundreds of pages.
“And it was not only the comments themselves, but the quality of the comments,” he said. “This way you can get people to actually sit down, think about an issue and write a multi-paragraph comment.”
The demographic data collected from several Wikiplanning exercises has found some striking patterns: In places as diverse as Cleveland County and San Jose, roughly two-thirds of participants are ages 25-55, and 10-15 percent are over 55.
“There was some concern early on that this would be something that under-26-year-olds would participate in. The fact is, so many people are on line now that we are getting a nice spread in terms of the impact,” Ryan says.
Some people also are concerned with how Wikiplanning might use the data it collects, including email addresses. “We don’t share emails or other information,” Ryan stresses.
WANT TO LEARN MORE?
Visit www.Wikiplanning.org or call 704-644-7726 to learn more about Wikiplanning. And if you want to participate in the University Research Park Project, simply enter the password: URPP, when prompted after clicking on “get started now”.
|