Student Isadora Cruxen, Hannah Payne, Fayrouz Saad
Client Participatory Budgeting Project
Tools IFTTT, SQL
Year 2015

ABSTRACT

Participatory budgeting processes in the U.S. thus far do not rely significantly on social media for idea collection, focusing instead on in-person idea collection and online collection through mapping tools, such as Shareabouts. People are increasingly reliant on social media, including Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook,for building social connections and for engaging with their communities. Because so much of the population is already using social media on a daily basis, it is an easy entry point to participate in processes like participatory budgeting. Drawing on inspiration from other online participatory processes that use social media to engage participants, we arrived at two key conclusions: 1) idea collection and idea submission need to be as simple as possible; 2) idea visualization has to be straightforward and attractive. With this in mind, we created the concept of a “brainstorm” page that uses various tools to pull tagged posts from social media into one place—making it easier for participants to see other people’s ideas and submit new ideas.

With simplicity as the goal, we sought to bring it into the identity of our project as well, choosing an easy to identify hashtag, #PB, and a catchy, bright pink piggy bank as a logo. The piggy bank represents citizen control over budget decisions and is intended to catch people’s attention. The simple hashtag can be customized for your city (ie. #PBBOS) and can be used to tag ideas and rally support for the PB process. A consistent and easily recognizable identity creates stronger brand recognition and can help encourage participation across all platforms in the PB process, a key factor in idea generation.

Student Luxi Lin, Hayrettin Gunc
Client Participatory Budgeting Project
Tools Form Desk, Zapier
Year 2015

ABSTRACT

When we think about emerging crowdsourcing tools and their applications, one can see the domination of digital tools. From different social media platforms to online crowdsourcing websites, these tools help us to harness inputs and creativity of crowds in different ways. However, conventional methods like interviews,focus groups,workshops or assemblies still protect their popularity in different cultural and demographic conditions and still considered reliable sources for qualitative idea collection. Through this semester, we wanted to work on how we can bridge physical and digital idea collection methods and we came up with Live Assembly which is a real time data collection and analysis tool that allows its users to map, categorize and link ideas with other digital tools.

Our client for the project was Participatory Budgeting which is a nation-wide organization that organizes community members to come together and directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. Through this process the initiative invites community members to share ideas on projects to improve in this case Cambridge. Currently, the organization engages with the community using both digital and physical methods. On the digital side, they use a web platform that allows citizens to share, locate and discuss their ideas with each other. In terms of face-to-face interaction, the organization mostly depends on assemblies and some pop-up events from time to time.The organization is challenged by the very same problem of disconnection between physical and digital methods and gave us the green light to focus our energy on this issue.

Building on the feedback that we got from our client, we have identified our focus areas to improve this process. Our strategy includes series of online forms that are connected to each other and aggregate their results in a database. Our first focus area is Sign-Up Process. Live Assembly introduces digital sign in tools which lets us send RSVP mails before the assembly and see who is coming or not. During the assembly, digital sign-in also allows the volunteers to tag the ideas with the participants so that interaction can continue in the digital website. Our second focus area was Idea Collection. With Live Assembly volunteers can map the ideas, categorize and prioritize them in a single interface. It allows coordinators and volunteers to make necessary edits and organize entries before they are pushed into the website.The third focus area is follow up. By using webhooks, Live Assembly can feed its data to other service providers like Shareabouts or Mailchimp in order to expand the interaction of assemblies.

Student Carolina Morgan, Fei Xu, Marcel Williams, Rida Qadri
Client Digital Matatus
Tools App Inventor, Fusion Tables
Year 2015

ABSTRACT

Nairobi’s Matatus system is a complex one that is always changing to meet the transit needs of the city. The matatus route map needs to be equally dynamic. Our task was to create an app that would help the Digital Matatus team streamline some of its data collection and analysis process to be able to keep the map current and accurate. We conceptualized an app that will crowdsource route data by enticing users to track their matatus rides. Our prototype only begins to illustrate the possibilities. There is great potential to expand the app into an integral part of the matatus experience.

“Umati” means crowd in Swahili. We chose this name because it reflects the main aspect of the app: its power lies in its widespread use. So developing an incentive for riders to use the app was key.

The concept was as follows:

1. A user intending to ride a matatus turns on the app to navitage an interactive map with an overlay of matatus routes in order to find which route to take and where is her stop.
2. Before she gets on the bus, she enters her trip parameters. She selects her the matatus route she is taking, her starting point (her current location) and her destination (this is important in case she later forgets to turn off her tracking).
3. Once she gets on her bus, she starts the tracking. As she rides, the app collects a series of GPS points which get labeled according to the route she identified. She can see where she is on the map and the distance she has travelled.
4.When she arrives at her destination and ends her tracking, her meters travelled get converted into points we call “MATokens.”
5.These points unlock coupons which she can trade for goods and services at local stores. She also earns badges as she rides more and more which she can post on her social media pages.The points collected get added to a database. Each rider’s trip becomes a fragment that is part of the larger system of routes.The data can then be aggregated either manually or automatically into an updated map. An algorithm could be written to determine a threshold for when enough users differ from an existing route to redraw the map.

Student Chaewon Ahn, Austin Smith
Client ERASE RACISM
Tools IFTTT, Fusion Tables
Year 2015

ABSTRACT

Erase Racism is a regional organization that leads public policy advocacy campaigns and related programmatic initiatives to promote racial equity in areas, such as housing, public school education, public health and community development. It engages in a variety of research, education and consulting activities to address institutional and structural racism, primarily in Long Island. The objective of this game is to expose forms of racial discrimination and advocate for laws and policies that help eliminate racial disparities, particularly in the areas of housing, community development, public education and health through the crowdsourced collection of personal narratives.

The essential concept of the game is twofold:

1. To build an online interactive platform for participants to test their assumptions about the reality of structural racism in their neighborhood.
2.To use the physical and virtual collection of personal stories to better understand the myriad ways structural racism effects people on Long Island. Using both a web platform as well as physical cards, the platform works as an event out in the community as well as an interactive repository online.

Student Alexis Howland, Bernard Harkness, Alicia Rouault, Qianqian Zhang
Client Made in the Lower East Side (miLES)
Tools WordPress, Textizen
Year 2013

ABSTRACT

What was here yesterday?
What can be here tomorrow?

Futurefront uses on-the-street poster campaigns to solicit feedback via text messaging from community members about potential uses for vacant storefronts. Futurefront encouraged users to learn about the history of the sites they visited while thinking about future possibilities.

A series of interventions were used to crowd source citizen feedback on what the future public programming should be in various storefronts being put to use by miLES in New York City’s Lower East Side. By producing print posters which prompted passersby to text in their answer, Futurefront provided a digital-analog method of gathering input data in real time. The team also distributed ‘treasure maps’ of the target storefronts to event attendees. Additionally, a website was created as an alternate channel for users to provide input and explore historical information about the buildings. Futurefront had several components that were used in an event based strategy. In future implementations, components can be used in conjunction with each other or as standalone methods for gathering community input.

The Futurefront team tested this digital-analog strategy at the 2013 Ideas City Festival in New York City. The team found that prominently displaying the instructions for the texting-based survey is critical for improving participation. Incentives for texting in responses should be explored, such as using historical information and imagery as a ‘hook’. Providing for long-term signage at the vacant storefronts would also attract more responses. The team did find that most passerby are excited and interested in MiLES’s idea.

Student Erica Deahl, Chris Rhie
Client Center for Urban Pedagogy
Tools WordPress, Textizen
Year 2013

ABSTRACT

“City Digits: A collaborative project to develop and pilot test innovative resources and tools that support high school students’ learning of mathematics… related to the local, urban context.”

The team worked with MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab and the Center for Urban Pedagogy to develop a curriculum for exploring lottery experiences at the neighborhood level. The concept spanned three objectives: enabling student journalism and field research, examining the lottery through personal narratives, and creating a crowdsourced map with photos and interview highlights. Within the City Digits lesson plan, the students would be introduced to the lottery through a series of activities, and the Local Lotto website would then collect the students’ interviews with lottery players and retailers in the neighborhood, as well as the students’ reflections in class.

The Local Lotto web tool itself needed to be accessible from multiple types of digital devices, including Android tablets and desktop web browsers. To support data input and ease of use, the team opted for a workflow that included Form Assembly for gathering text input, media, and geolocation data, then organizing these data in Google Fusion Tables for mapping. The website now features excerpts from the interviews that students conducted in their New York City neighborhoods.

The web site and curriculum development, and subsequent on-the-street testing of the Local Lotto platform, raised many questions about ways in which technology and journalism can be harnessed and expanded for student education. How can the site evolve to link the learning experiences and foster discussions across schools in different neighborhoods? Can the site be used to encourage the students to reflect and share their own intervention designs? These questions, and experimentation with other digital tools for data collection and mapping, are a point of departure for future curriculum development.

Student Emily Eros, Ulises Reyes
Client Community Labor United
Tools WordPress, Youtube, Google Forms
Year 2013

ABSTRACT

With this video blog, the student team took on the client’s challenge to harness the power of stories to spread awareness and advocate for better transit services. The blog format provides a story curation and dissemination tool for transit advocates. The site will become a conduit for the crowdsourced stories of Public Transit-Public Good, a statewide partnership of transit workers and riders who are campaigning for sustainable, affordable, and accessible transit service throughout Massachusetts.

The website features a growing collection of Youtube-hosted interviews with transit riders and activists. It also shows users how to contact local representatives, in order to share the transit story videos and their own ideas about improving transit service. The team developed the website format around the key objectives of making it easy to update, integrating it with existing social media and video platforms, and expanding functionality and interactivity with WordPress plugins. These plugins then allow video sharing, rating, and featuring of videos as users add them through Youtube. Future live events will provide an opportunity to promote the site and collect more video stories in person.

Student Andrew Cook, Rodrigo Davies, Katie Lorah
Client Boston Office of New Urban Mechanics, in cooperation with the Office of Food Initiatives and the Mayor’s Youth Council
Tools Word Press, Instagram, Twitter, IFTTT
Year 2013

ABSTRACT

“We want to make it easier for Boston youth to eat healthy, affordable food… you’ll help lead an effort to collect, map and present information about fresh food in Boston.” - Office of Food Initiatives

Fresh Food Boston is a website highlighting users photos of Boston’s healthiest and freshest food. Working from a monthly theme, Bostonians submit their best food photos through the website, a mobile web app, Twitter, or Instagram. Site viewers can vote for and share their favorites, and the most popular photos each month can win prizes. Users pinpoint their photos on an interactive map of Boston, so others can use the map to discover fresh, healthy food near them.

The website concept grew out of multiple conversations with the client, including interviews and beta-testing with members of the Mayor’s Youth Council. The development team identified three key concepts around which to structure the fresh food tool: location, price, and photography–with an emphasis on the popular practice of sharing food photos online. The target audience of Boston youth already uses smartphones to connect to social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, and Yelp, so the team elected to build on these existing networks and incentivize use of the Fresh Food Boston site. The first theme, “What does $5 buy at a Farmers Market?”, coincides with the start of the market season and will in a photography exhibit at City Hall for the contest winners.

Student Danielle Berger, John Hosung Lee, Kenneth Nadolski, and Jordan Salinger
Client Transportation Alternatives
Tools Ushahidi
Year 2013

ABSTRACT

Working with Transportation Alternatives, this group developed a tool to allow TA to expand their existing CrashStat website with crowd sourced information about bike crashes and unsafe streets. Transportation Alternatives is one of the country’s leading advocacy groups for pedestrian and bicyclist safety. They work on many fronts to reduce vehicular traffic in New York City and promote bicycling, walking and public transit. Some of their recent campaigns include the East Side Action Plan, which is focused on street safety on the east side of Manhattan and Vision Zero, a plan for zero deaths, zero injuries and zero fear of traffic. TA also advocates for parking reform and the creation of “complete streets” which allows for all forms of transportation to occur safely and sustainably in the same space. TA wanted to create a crowd sourcing tool that would allow people to contribute photos, videos and stories that could ultimately become a layer on their CrashStat 3.0 map. Through this project, we created an interactive multimedia platform that addressed the needs of Transportation Alternatives and utilized crowd sourced data.

After meeting with TA, volunteer committees and active members in the cycling community, it became evident that the project would take that form of an interactive, online map which people could add data via the website, smart phone and text messaging. The goal was to get community members to submit photos, videos or written stories about their experiences on the streets of New York with the final product being a multimedia database that could ultimately be used for advocacy projects.



KEY FINDINGS

* Language is key in getting the type of community input the organization is looking for
* Visual design and consistency is crucial in communicating an idea
* Pre-feeding your site with the type of content you expect helps users understand what to do

Student Julia Fredenburg, Doneliza Joaquin, Joshua Saal, Francesca Camillo
Client Design Trust for Public Space, with support from Brook Park and the New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries
Tools Tumblr, FrontlineSMS
Year 2011
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

Urban farms have become increasingly commonplace in many urban neighborhoods throughout the US. They have started many conversations within neighborhoods as well as between residents and their governing bodies. In lower income neighborhoods, the need to make healthful foods accessible to city dwellers has become a focus of many advocates that frame it as a social justice issue. Food access has also been re-framed as a primary public health issue wherein city agencies play an active role through policy.

We intended for participants to walk through their neighborhood and re-imagine better uses for underused or uninviting spaces. After participants planted their FARM THIS signs, thereby manifesting their ideas for better uses of urban space, the crowd sourcing aspect of our project becomes apparent. We asked each person to take a picture of his or her “installation,” either with a smart phone camera or a digital camera. The next step was to text message or email(tapaib907@tumblr.com) the photo(s) taken so that they would appear on our online photoblog. We decided to use Tumblr as the medium for our photoblog. If the students (or any other participants) did not have access to a data plan, or did not have a smart phone, an alternative was to upload the photos taken onto a computer and manually email the photos to the Tumblr site.

Ultimately, this project was intended to yield a catalogue of geo-tagged, community-captured photos in blog format; it was to become a virtual manifestation of the participants’ imaginations of those areas thus illustrating what the community would like to see. FARM THIS is ultimately an exercise for all involved to imagine the possibilities of re-configuring the built environment from a novel perspective. In many ways, this project was a way to begin a conversation between neighbors about how to improve the environs, and whether or not urban farms can become a visual or physical amenity.

Student Danielle Dowler, Norabelle Greenberger, Aisha Qamar, Stephanie Servetz
Client Brownsville Partnership
Tools Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS
Year 2011
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

We worked with the Brownsville Partnership to develop a tool to enable Brownsville residents to talk about safe and unsafe places in Brownsville. One challenge we faced was creating a balance between a sort of “crisis map” devoted solely to the collection of crime information had the potential to be detrimental to the Brownsville community psyche and image. We then shifted our focus to creating an online community space where people could share information about what’s happening in Brownsville. The focus would be on information sharing, similar to how Facebook encourages people to keep friends informed of what’s happening in each other’s lives. In Brownsville, this would include information such as the best restaurants in town, planned community events, places where public safety is a concern, as well as crime reports. We would not publish all submitted information, but guard the more sensitive ones (i.e. crime reports) for BP to use for statistics gathering. Thinking to the future, the public safety information they receive would equip them with a way to formalize what people are already telling them, so they could more successfully advocate on the community’s behalf when speaking to City and State agencies. The more immediate purpose, though, would be to keep the BP informed about news in the neighborhood and encourage a new form of community interaction.

KEY FINDINGS

* Working with the community is the only way to be sure that a tool will be used and work for the community
* Language and branding is crucial in how a tool is received

Student Jared Culp, Violeta Duncan, JaeYoung Paek, Alex Wallach
Client MS328
Tools Word Press, Quora, Polldaddy
Year 2011
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

We worked with the Brownsville Partnership to develop a tool to enable Brownsville residents to talk about safe and unsafe places in Brownsville. One challenge we faced was creating a balance between a sort of “crisis map” devoted solely to the collection of crime information had the potential to be detrimental to the Brownsville community psyche and image. We then shifted our focus to creating an online community space where people could share information about what’s happening in Brownsville. The focus would be on information sharing, similar to how Facebook encourages people to keep friends informed of what’s happening in each other’s lives. In Brownsville, this would include information such as the best restaurants in town, planned community events, places where public safety is a concern, as well as crime reports. We would not publish all submitted information, but guard the more sensitive ones (i.e. crime reports) for BP to use for statistics gathering. Thinking to the future, the public safety information they receive would equip them with a way to formalize what people are already telling them, so they could more successfully advocate on the community’s behalf when speaking to City and State agencies. The more immediate purpose, though, would be to keep the BP informed about news in the neighborhood and encourage a new form of community interaction.

KEY FINDINGS

* Working with the community is the only way to be sure that a tool will be used and work for the community
* Language and branding is crucial in how a tool is received

Student Sean Ansanelli, Kathrin Hamm, Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa Mariscal, Maxwell Sokol, George Valdes
Client Participatory Budgeting NYC and Urban Justice Center
Tools Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, Interviews
Year 2011
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

Our mission in this project was to complement the Participatory Budgeting New York City (PBNYC) initiative by contributing a new crowdsourcing component – via an SMS function tied to a Ushahidi platform – to fill a gap that we identified in the avenues of communication being pursued in the official process. Our client for the project was the Center for Urban Justice, who was primarily interested in our help to streamline the entry of survey data following the official vote in March 2012 because of their limited staff resources and the quick turnaround time to prepare for round two of the PBNYC initiative for the City’s 2012-2013 Fiscal Year. Although our client was most interested in the research side of the PBNYC initiative, we ultimately implemented a project that, while supportive of our client’s goals, is more closely aligned to both the mission of this class and the PBNYC initiative more broadly, namely to maximize public participation.

KEY FINDINGS

* Understanding how the community communicates is crucial
* Crowdsourcing does not necessarily mean using technology or maps

Student Greta Byrum, Tanya Fonseca, Danil Nagy, Mia Pears, Vanessa Smith, Jennifer So Godzeno
Client Brownsville Partnership
Tools Facebook, Ushahidi
Year 2010
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

Our mission in this project was to complement the Participatory Budgeting New York City (PBNYC) initiative by contributing a new crowdsourcing component – via an SMS function tied to a Ushahidi platform – to fill a gap that we identified in the avenues of communication being pursued in the official process. Our client for the project was the Center for Urban Justice, who was primarily interested in our help to streamline the entry of survey data following the official vote in March 2012 because of their limited staff resources and the quick turnaround time to prepare for round two of the PBNYC initiative for the City’s 2012-2013 Fiscal Year. Although our client was most interested in the research side of the PBNYC initiative, we ultimately implemented a project that, while supportive of our client’s goals, is more closely aligned to both the mission of this class and the PBNYC initiative more broadly, namely to maximize public participation.

KEY FINDINGS

* Understanding how the community communicates is crucial
* Crowdsourcing does not necessarily mean using technology or maps

Student Diana Rodriguez, Daniel Kimicata, Jaclyn Carlsen
Client MS328
Tools CrowdMap
Year 2010
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

This project was a joint effort between teachers at the Manhattan School for Scientific Inquiry (MS 328) and graduate students at Columbia University. During a school-wide “Sustainability Week in November, we engaged with two teachers and an educational consultant to explore children’s access to healthy foods. Students mapped locations where they could purchase fast food and healthy food, and were able to visually see the information they gathered. Teachers then challenged their students to analyze the data through statistics and graphs. The purpose of this project was to enhance students’ understanding of healthy and unhealthy food choices in the area and ultimately improve food choices by fostering awareness of food choices and health in students, parents and teachers. Our clients would like this initiative to extend beyond Sustainability Week and use the data gathered for better food options in the community. To support these efforts we co-created an interactive learning tool. Using an free online mapping site called Crowdmap, based off of Ushahidi, we set up a map of the Washington Heights area where students uploaded the food choice information they gathered. Through canvassing the area, recording food options, and taking photos, the students were able to strengthen their data gathering, analysis, and mapping skills, and create a spatial understanding of healthy and unhealthy food options in their school’s neighborhood. Ultimately, we found that the data gathering process we used did not lend itself to strong quantitative data, but that it could be used as a good conversation piece around food options and could be expanded to a district-wide project.

KEY FINDINGS

* Crowd Sourced data is not necessarily representative data
* Data entry processes must be made simple and accessible for participants
* An accessible product/tool must be imagined in order for the community to continue to engage with and discuss the issues

Student Arvind Murthy, Georgia Bullen, Kate Cho
Client The Fashion Center BID and Design Trust for Public Space
Tools WordPress, Flash, SMS Reception
Year 2010
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

We worked with the Fashion Center BID and the Design Trust for Public Space, an advocacy agency for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). Each agency has unique goals. The Fashion Center BID is comprised of the businesses and landlords who have joined the organization from within the general boundaries of 35th Street to 41st Street between 5th Avenue and 9th Avenue. The Fashion Center BIDs’ mission is to “sustain and improve the vibrancy and vitality of the Fashion District by promoting” the location to fashion and non-fashion businesses. The Design Trust for Public Space is a non-profit, located in the Fashion Center BID, who’s main mission is to improve NYC’s “parks, plazas, streets, and public buildings” through partnership projects with advocacy organizations, public agencies and design professionals. The DT recently partnered with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), a non-profit trade association for designers, on a project called Made in Midtown, which examined the role that fashion plays in Midtown Manhattan. The designers represented by the CFDA are interested in maintaining a low profile in the area, but are interested in the role that proximity in the district creates. The DT and the Fashion Center BID are interested in continuing to study additional aspects of the importance of the location of the Garment District as a public space and a strategic location. Our team decided to focus on furthering the research on the role that the district plays within the city. Specifically, we were interested in what the public perception of the district is and who is the community interested in the district. These upper levels of non-descript buildings dot the district and the regular passerby would have no idea that operations related to the creation and production of fashion related industries are taking place up above. We decided to explore this question by crowd sourcing what the public thinks happens above ground level in the district. We used two methods to ask this question: engagement on the street via stickering campaign and text messaging and engagement online via social media.

KEY FINDINGS

* Engaging & usable website is crucial for participation
* Incentive needed to encourage participation from the general public
* Stickers are difficult to see with all the visual noise of the urban environment
* CrowdSourcing can be a useful marketing & advertising tool

Student Judy Chang, Lola Feiger, Michael Shyu
Client Council of Fashion Designers of America and the Fashion Center BID
Tools Google Latitude, Google Earth, SMS Reception, ArcGIS
Year 2010
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

The Garment District, New York City’s fashion epicenter, is currently threatened by rezoning. Until now, fashion manufacturing has been protected along the area’s side streets, resulting in the clustering of factories and warehouses, and the fashion businesses they serve. The Council of Fashion Designers of America maintains that without this localization of fashion operations, and their protection from encroaching commercial and residential takeover, the fashion industry in New York will cease to exist. The CFDA argues that not only does this nexus of production allow for designers’ immediate access to manufacturers, which saves time and money, but suppressed rents help encourage emerging talent to take root. A garment’s production from idea to completion requires an interdependent network of highly skilled specialists, all present in the Garment District, and, like any other clustered industry, proximity fosters research and development innovations. Our study, an extension of The Design Trust for Public Space’s 2009 Made in Midtown study, addresses directly whether proximity matters to the fashion design process. Using Google Latitude-enabled cell phones, we mapped the daily work activities of a handful of design industry professionals located in the Garment District. Participants also supplemented this basic geographic information with time-stamped, abbreviated descriptions of their activities, text messaged to a centralized modem we configured. After a week of data collection patterns can begin to be seen. However, an extended run-time and sample size would be necessary for any definitive conclusions to be drawn.

KEY FINDINGS

* CrowdSourcing works as data collection in this process
* Data collection must be simple to make participation easy
* Considerable time required for investigators to collate data
* Accuracy of available tools is limited
* Reveals complexity of fashion process; could reveal more about specific tasks and processes

Student Christina Ghan, Eugenia Manwelyan, Alli Greenberg, Ben Huff, Megan Cassidy
Client Transportation Alternatives
Tools WordPress, Twitter, Mapology, BuddyPress, Google Forms, Google Latitude
Year 2010
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

Our group worked with Transportation Alternatives, an organization that advocates primarily for bicycle safety and increased ridership in New York City. They have lobbied extensively for improved bicycle infrastructure and bike lanes, as well as promoted the use of public transportation. However, for many bicyclists, Midtown Manhattan is a notoriously unsafe and intimidating space to ride a bike. Transportation Alternatives feels that if Midtown can be transformed into a bicycle-commuting hub, the rest of the City will quickly follow suit. Our job was to support this effort. Transportation Alternatives asked us to explore patterns of ridership, particularly between veteran and novice riders, in the Midtown area to ascertain what resources are needed to support and facilitate bike riding in the area. After thoughtful background research and discussion with our focus group, the Broadway Green Alliance, the project that we ultimately implemented was a website that would allow riders to connect with other riders and share route information. At the front end, our website allows riders to network with other riders, and on the back end, the website acts as a data gathering tool on biking conditions in the Midtown area for Transportation Alternatives. Our website is called BikeCuriousNYC.

KEY FINDINGS

* Intends customization of plug & play technology
* Project works by building community to encourage advocacy
* Community and user needs must be balanced against agency and advocacy needs
* Functionality and design must be made simple

Student Eric Couper, Kathy Kurtak, Xiaohong Pan
Client NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Tools Ushahidi, SMS Reception
Year 2010
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

We developed the Green Arrow (GA) platform following a consultation with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOMHM). One of the most public and universal DOHMH efforts is their Take Care NYC initiative that encourages resident’s to adopt healthier lifestyles. These healthy habits include increasing regular physical activity, eating more fruits and vegetables, drinking fewer sugary beverages, eating fewer bad fats (trans fats) and eating less salt. Many organisations have shown interest in furthering this effort in their community and have registered with the DOHMH as health partners. Up to this point most of the suggested ways of participating in the initiative targeted at abstract topics of health rather than daily acitivities. We saw an opportunity to create an activity that would engage members of these organisations in an active, conversation-starting way. Green Arrow is our response to that goal. Green Arrow, at its core, is a sharing platform that blurs the lines between the physical and the digital, the stranger and the friend. It enables users to share their observations, answering one simple question: How does your physical environment influence your health? After a user places a GA sticker in her physical environment and shares her observation at www.greenarrowmap.com, GA takes care of the rest. Other users are able to learn about those stickers by looking at the map online or by texting in from the sticker location.

KEY FINDINGS

* Branding must be eye-catching and recognizable for busy urban environment
* Simple directions and graphics needed for all platforms
* Event-based and outdoor markers add more value in warm weather
* Engaging organizations and communities is more likely to succeed than reaching out to individuals

Student Samantha Choudhury, Alex Villarino, Pamela Puchalski
Client NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Tools SMS Reception, WordPress
Year 2010
at Columbia University

ABSTRACT

Eating Healthy in East Harlem is a crowdsourcing tool developed for residents of East Harlem. The aim of the project is to create an online platform for residents to share information with each other about ways to improve their health and eating habits. We believe that behavior changes are most effective when implemented through peer-to-peer exchange and feedback rather than top-down or bottom-up processes alone. We also believe that youth play a significant role in public education at the community and household levels. In light of the existing food desert and related health problems such as obesity and diabetes that disproportionately affect residents of East Harlem, we targeted middle- and high-school students in the area with a crowdsourcing campaign intended to raise awareness about the importance of healthy eating. Knowing that a community’s greatest asset is their residents, we hoped to provide a means by which residents could identify their favorite healthy foods and the places where healthy foods are available. Using Post-it notes designed and printed by students, we placed 1,000 stickers in six target zones – on street-corners and in public parks as well as restaurants and high traffic zones of East Harlem. These zones were identified according to concentrations of public housing and transportation as well as the relative lack of healthy food options compared to other areas of East Harlem. The campaign lasted for approximately one week and the results included 77 responses to four short, open-ended questions about healthy eating. These responses were posted to a website which serves as one of the deliverables of this project.

KEY FINDINGS

* Responses came when investigators actively engaged with the community, especially face-to-face
* Many participants displayed prior knowledge of the topic (healthy eating)
* Participants, especially students, were eager to participate
* Data should be made accessible to participants and others