Last week, Rafe Needleman at CNET had an interesting article on open data and transit agencies. The long and the short of it is that while some agencies (such as our own TriMet and San Francisco’s Muni) are at the forefront of making their data available to the public, other agencies are going the opposite [...]

I’ve been watching the progress of WES, TriMet’s first commuter rail line, with great interest since its opening in February. One of the many aspects of it that strikes me as fascinating is the total lack of understanding by some of the function of commuter rail. On more than one occasion, I have heard people [...]

Last week’s news was a bit of a shocker in the region, as Washington State went through its primary election. Voters seemed to be bludgeoning incumbents, from rural port commissioners through to mayors of significant municipalities. As Jeff Mapes put it, it was a bad day for incumbents. The biggest upset, however, was the defeat [...]

Previously, I talked about how to illustrate the transition of an area in relation to building forms and mass. Displaying anticipated or proposed changes such as these to the public can be fraught with conflict, as citizens display community change adversity in the face of what feels deceptively like a cohesive civic juggernaut.
Another example [...]

Recently I was reading a post on David Eaves’ blog about how involved (or uninvolved) today’s youth are in politics. Eaves makes the point that many of the younger generation are not uninvolved, they are simply involved in what he terms “extra political engagement:”
But because the efforts are often invisible, herein lies the real dangers: [...]

Planners have what I consider to be one of the toughest jobs in government. They are charged with charting long range courses that are often beyond visualization to all but a few dreamers, and often those very dreamers are either cranks or, well, other planners. (Please hold all cynical remarks, thank you!) But what makes [...]

For those of us who have spent long hard years in public service as citizen activists, it is sometimes hard to understand how government really functions. I don’t mean who reports to whom, but rather why governments act the way they do, and who really makes a given decision, and how they are reached. At [...]

Public outreach is something that — especially in the Portland region — we talk a good game about, but rarely do we do it well. Sure, we make lots of pretty brochures and web sites, but when it comes time to go out and do some face-to-face with the public time, we tend to become [...]

Industrial parks have fascinated me for a long time. They are largely an artifact of the 20th century, but with their arrangement of small-to-medium industrial buildings and extensive rail infrastructure, in many ways they were the last expression of 19th century economics, philosophically obsolete from the moment they were built. A visit to the average [...]

Sometimes the terminology of public participation professions is a complicated word stew. Public involvement, public outreach, public relations, public affairs, community affairs, community relations, community outreach… what the heck are all these terms? Do they all really mean the same thing, or are they all different? if the latter, how can someone make sense of [...]