Ultra Fine Granularity

Charles Marohn from the Strong Towns blog has produced two articles that analyze at a granular level the economics of Lafayette, Louisiana. 

The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money
The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
Jan-10-2017
Charles Marohn
Strong Towns

Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment
Jan-11-2017
Charles Marohn
Strong Towns

Marohn working with the city, examining the municipalities revenues vs. expenses by each parcel of land.  It looks like the analysis was based off of tax revenue for each parcel, as well as the cost of repaving the adjacent road surface, plus providing other city services (the methodology in the article was a bit lacking).  
The result was a three dimensional heat map of the city, red parcels costing the city in regards to services provided, versus green areas that paid in excess of taxes to services received by the city.

The inner core, mostly green in colour, produced a net gain in revenue for the city. The inner core can be characterized by a high population density, and smaller city blocks that are walk-able.  The red parts of the map are predominately strip malls on the periphery of the city that have low density, as well as the suburban cul-de-sac streets. 

The reason the urban core, though less affluent, is revenues positive for the city lays in density. Several small, less well to do businesses, on one city block, can generate more tax revenue than one affluent businesses taking a whole city block.  Think 10 small establishments worth $50,000 each, versus one $250,000 establishment.  This is the conclusion that Marohn comes to.

What fascinates me about Marohn's analysis is the fine level of granular data that Strong Towns is working with.  Examining the city by almost 20ft chunks gives a startling picture about the economics of a mid-sized city.

A New Year

January 3rd, 2017. CivicTechTo and Budgetpedia

The Meetup was held at U of T’s  School of Public Policy & Governance (thanks for hosting!). Approx. 70 people in attendance with lots of new attendees, many U of T students checking it out.

For the New Year the presenter was Elena Potter from CivicTech giving some encouraging stats about the Meetup;
hitting the one year mark,
1400 members on Meetup and 600 on Slack,
largest turnout was 80 people,
CivicTech members spoke at conferences, municipalities and universities,
45 presenters (half women).

Budgetpedia Minutes

In attendance; Alex, Rob, Jim, Henrik, Arthur, Ian, Eric

The majority of the meeting was regarding the user experience testing of the site.  Last meeting 6 people went through UX testing.  Resulting suggests turning off options switch, as too many options are displayed.
There was also some discussion about forking  on Github, separating out the graphics and the database.
The inclusion of search-able links to all the graphs produced would help with search engine optimization.
Henrik suggested perhaps reorganizing the site by concepts the public would be interested in.
The real challenge comes to identifying real users, as well as finding and including more granular data.

After the UX discussion Rob proposed better documentation of the project through the production of ‘Team Guide’, that would have all the FAQ such as history, mission statement, vision statement, and team leaders. This was followed by thoughts on how to make the site ‘actionable’ for users.

Some Further Thoughts

There is a bit of running in circles to start the new year concerning what direction to go. This I feel is mainly in trying to determine which users we are trying to appeal to. So far three different users and with them visions of the site exists.  Even though great overlap exists about the final outcome, choosing the user to appeal to will shape the direction of what is needed to produce and who to market to.

This site is for municipal employees.  Budgetpedia can inspire the city on how to run more efficiently by combine all department information into one location - this would allow for easier analysis of the budget.  At the minimum prevent the city from purchasing costly, proprietary, financial software.

Budgetpeida is for social activists to research facts, and help create narratives around complex social issues through the use of data.

Budgetpedia is for the general public, for ordinary people, to quickly scan the city’s budget.

It's going to be interesting to see which of these visions prevails. 

Thanks to Civic Tech Toronto for organizing the Meetup group that Budgetpedia runs under, and thanks to HackerYou for the space and food.

Last night's Civic Tech had a staggering amount of projects, 8 others aside from Budgetpedia; Guerrilla Archiving, Toronto Community Networks, Mydem0cracy, Ballot Changing Initiative,  TPL Booking Tool, PCOC, DemocracyKit, and Councilmatic.

The last hack night of the year sees Budgetpedia coalescing around establishing semi-permanent positions;
i) management,
ii) development,
iii) communications,
iv) research, and
v) ux design.
It seems as everything needs to be done at once.  Luckily people are stepping into the vacuum of the positions.  I've put on the blogger hat ( or is it a fedora) and am giving it a shot.

The main question of where Budgetpedia will go after its debut is still the Damoclean Sword hanging in the air.  Lots of people have helped with the project to date, the data is good, the ux will be worked out (fingers crossed).  At least the holidays will let everyone take a breather and think (maybe even come up with some grandiose schemes) of some new, fresh, initiatives to be part of our wonky New Year's resolutions.

Amadou and Alex, our two recent Parisian volunteers, seem keen to get going and perhaps not too unwilling to do some needed translation work.  I'll be interested in hearing their assessment of Budgetpedia, good, bad, or otherwise.

Jim carried out research in user experience, with the Budgetpedia site, during the break out groups, report on that sure to follow.

Here is to seeing everyone in 2017! It's a great group of people.