Open Plans

If you or your organization is interested in gaining access to a growing tool chest designed to grease the civic monkey, OpenPlans is a great place to look.

A decent wiki and blog are the emerging as the tip of a civic tool iceberg.

The list at left was originated at TOPP.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Aviva Directory - with more than 25 2.0 third party product. 

• ClustrMaps - show where your visitors are physically located (IP-based, I assume). Privacy implications. (GIS)
  

• Collaboration Software - While the person that compiled this page has an obvious grudge against Basecamp, it has driven him/her to create a long list of collaboration software, much of it open source. Added December 31, 2007.

• Doodle - tool to find suitable dates for appointments with other people -- free, very minimal (in a good way). (This works really well, even with web-naive people.)
• Flickr - the most popular photo-sharing platform on the web. Its free plans are quite generous.
• Google Analytics - shows statistics about visitors. Privacy implications.
• Google Calendar - everyone's favorite calendar software -- free, collaborative, but will eventually have ads.
  
• Google Docs - spreadsheet and word processor, with good collaborative capabilities.
• JWChat - open source ajax chat app. Probably the much better choice than meebo, as its OS. Built on jabber.
• Meebo - chat widgets. Right now I think you can just be a guest on pages, but hopefully eventually you'll be able to hang out on web pages with your normal IM login, like they allow in general.
• OpenPlans - The provider of this wiki page and other community building tools.
  
• Planning Alerts - first, enter your address or click on your house on a map. Second, select the distance of your interest area - 100 meters, 1/2 mile... Third, select frequency of alerts. Thereafter an RSS feed send you notices about building and construction in the hood. (GIS)
  
• Simile - MIT open source project that might be helpful in project planning / calendaring.
  
• Slide - flash widget to display photos, make slideshows.
  
• Snipshot - online interactive photo editor. Would require some more substantial integration to make it really useful.
  
• Survey Monkey - take surveys. 100 response limit on free account; good for small groups, might be a problem for larger or more public surveys.
• Thinkature - a shared whiteboard application.
• Upcoming - social events calendar. Something that would be nice to export to; it's not really an app that people would typically interact with directly (except when explicitly doing event publicity)
• Wufoo - a form builder: great for surveys, RSVPs, etc (is there a chance that users would hit the free limit too fast? -- 3 forms, 10 fields, 100 entries per month, seems pretty constrained; cheapest plan is rather expensive $9/month)
  
• Wikimapia - if you liked Wikipedia you'll like Wikimapia. It's not a spinoff of the Wikipedians, but a for profit. It enable one to place a comment on any part of a Google-like map. Very easy. Comment on the geographic entity, place links in the comment area. Vote on the accuracy of the comments. The controls are at issue. Would be great to see an alternate business model. (GIS)
  

• Surveys (maybe more directed than Wufoo? Wufoo is very fancy, but for a quick and dirty survey it is fairly complicated; also something with an inline-form option would be nice)
  
• Contact Your Representative (or just find your representative)
• Fax your representative
  
• Other event listings (Google Calendar may be too scheduling-focused, but not sure -- GData exports might be a good way of doing event listings with Google Calendar as the editor)
• Petitions (has more strict contact requirements than a survey)
• Chat rooms, for online meetings. Maybe Meebo? Ideally something with a way of accessing it with a normal web browser, maybe a Java applet. Maybe IRC is the best way. I tried ICQ, and it just looked like an IRC frontend. There's quite a few ways to access IRC through the web (of course we'd have to document how you use these). JWChat may be another option - supporting jabber protocol could be good, so people could use their other clients.
  
• Through-the-web contact form (Wufoo is actually pretty good for this, better than for surveys, except for the submission limits). We kind of have this in our anonymous email option and some other user details; maybe we could flesh it out just a bit to make it good enough as a contact form.
• Site traffic analysis (e.g., Google Analytics).
• Search engine optimization and analysis.
• Color palette picker
• Financial - keeping track of finances and general treasurer activities. The tasks needed are fairly limited -- basic expense tracking, maybe ongoing expenses, and donations.
  
• Speadsheet (plus we should suggest uses, as it's a general tool). Google Spreadsheet, Instacalc, ...?
• CafePress or something like it, for making promotional materials for your group. 

Development

As research continues, decision-making processes and tools will be a early enabling tool for the development process - what methods do we follow to decide which tools are developed first. Transparent algorithms (the rules that decide which features are most important, e.g., need, # of requests, impact, uniformity of support, etc.) are needed for the decision-support tool as well as local digg and search. See this article from BoingBoing on the work being done by Wikia.

Relevant Links

• Open Plans
  

• OpenPlans Third Part Software List
  

• Civics in Wikipedia
  
• BeyondVoting
• Cairns
  

• Public Consultation Best Practices
  

Key .nyc Pages

• The .nyc wiki Home Page
•  The Civics Project 
• Civic Space
• Civic Tools (this page)
  

• Civic Education

• Towards City TLDs in the Public Interest 

• The Operating Environment
  

• The Development Environment
• Connecting.nyc Inc's Home Page