 Hello everyone. My name is Michael Magerski, and I'm here visiting you from San Francisco. I am the CTO and technical director of a company called Stamen Design that does work with data visualization cartography map-making. Thank you, Jake, and thank you, Maria, for the excellent introduction. And I'm here to talk a little bit about kind of how cities, especially in California and the US, deal with participatory urbanism and democracy. But first a little bit about Stamen and the kind of projects that we do and the reason why I'm here to talk to you today. We're a fairly small firm. We're located in San Francisco. We're a mix of design technologists, and we work on kind of a range of projects. This is something that we did for MSNBC a few years ago, visualizing the tracks of hurricanes throughout the Atlantic Ocean during the hurricane season, where we're looking at kind of scientific visualization that has a direct applicability to people's lives, who are looking to see whether hurricanes are going to hit their town. And understand how they might plan around this stuff. We also do things that are more traditionally media focused. This is a screenshot from a project that we've been doing over the years with MTV, centered around the video music awards every summer, where we essentially look at the tracks of information that people are using Twitter for in order to look and see basically what artists and what VMA musicians people are talking about on Twitter. So this is a screenshot showing that people are talking about pink's dress and Shakira wearing the same dress during the VMAs in 2009. If you remember the 2010 VMAs where Kanye West interrupted Taylor's award acceptance speech, basically we were looking at the kind of live Twitter visualizations that stuff. And then finally we do projects for companies like National Geographic. We did an iPad application that allowed people to navigate the collegiate atlas that the National Geographic publishes for college students. But I'm actually wanting to come and talk to you from a slightly smaller platform, which is the city where I actually live across the bay from San Francisco. It's called Oakland, California. It's just across the bay and in a lot of ways, I think it actually acts as an interesting microcosm for thinking about participatory democracy. Because the US city, Oakland, which I think has the greatest opportunities for modern data-driven participatory urbanism, is also the city with a lot of its most serious challenges. Now, can I get a show of hands really quickly who's actually heard of Oakland, California? So a few of you have. And I'm guessing that the reason that you've probably heard of it is because of things like the Occupy Oakland protest that was kind of a West Coast corollary to the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Or the earlier protests surrounding the shooting death of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was killed by the transit police in Oakland, California. I have a lot of very personal relationships for these things, partially because of the neighborhood that we live in. You know, a lot of the protests around Oscar Grant basically tore through our neighborhood of apartments. And I happened to be on the same train as Oscar Grant during the New Year's Eve when he was killed. So we deal with a lot of these kind of very hard-core, tough, nut-to-crack, urban problems in Oakland that make it seem like a very hopeless city. And yet, it's also a very interesting city of contrasts because it's home to things that would make you think that it's some of the most advanced thinking about urban participation. For example, there's an organization called Code for America, which has for the past two or three years been focusing on essentially grant-making to cities and creating fellowship programs around doing, like, adopt a hydrant programs and other kind of technology initiatives with U.S. cities. And the founder for Code for America, Jennifer Polka, happens to be a long-time resident of Oakland, California, and a major booster of Oakland, California. For those of you who remember the game SimCity, this is kind of an urban simulation environment that's been going for the past 30 years or so. Beautiful, beautiful game, kind of the first environment that I think a lot of young people first have in order to think about things like simulation of urban spaces and tax bases and, you know, all these kind of boring sounding things that together form a really fascinating, interesting game. And the creator of this game, Will Wright, actually lives also in Oakland, California. He lives up in the hills, and his experience is what the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991 formed a basis for a lot of the early kind of scenarios and disaster scenarios in this game. So, you know, the New York Times has talked about Oakland recently. They basically said that we have this long, easily romanticized history of militancy in an article titled, The Most Radical City in America. And yet, at the same time, we're the number five place to travel in the world, according to the same magazine. So how can both of these things be true? It's my feeling that both of these things have to be true in order for participatory democracy to make sense. I think the participatory urbanism, as Oakland experiences it, is something that's born from frustration, and it's something that requires a certain amount of tension to work. The photograph in the background of this slide is an image from the People's Library, which if you search for the hashtag People's Library on Twitter, you'll find the story of this abandoned library in East Oakland that's been essentially taken over by the citizens. They broke the doors open, they've cratered a library there, they've done things like food deliveries for the local community, and it's being done in this kind of sharp tension with the local government. I think it's a very different story in cities that aren't New York, where you have to think about kind of how you actually interface with the government. I think places like New York and places in Europe have a very, I would say, almost more easy-going relationship with government, where essentially when the people express a desire to do something, government is there to kind of help them and work with them. In places like Oakland and a lot of the more downtrodden parts of the U.S., that's not quite the case. You have to kind of fight for this stuff, and it's a lot more difficult. And I think that that happens in kind of two ways. So I want to talk about two projects that we've been involved in over the past few years that I think illustrate this from different angles. There's a process of creative destruction that I think is really heavily at work in processes around participatory urbanism. We did a project called Oakland Crime Spotting that was really a response to the assassination of a journalist named Chauncey Bailey, actually also just a few blocks away from my very, very busy house and busy neighborhood. And essentially, this man was shot in broad daylight, and it kind of brought the crime, the street crime, in a city like Oakland to the forefront of people's thinking about it. So we created a project called Oakland Crime Spotting that was a response to what we felt was a very poor service on the part of the city of Oakland in communicating crime information. They had a website called Crime Watch. This is the view of the place where you accept the terms of use, which is a very long set of paragraphs that you have to read. Once you move through this, before you can see any crime in your city and in your neighborhood, you have to kind of answer a bunch of questions. What crime do you want to see? What neighborhood? Where do you live? Do you want to see it for 30 days or 60 days or 90 days? It's basically a very discouraging kind of application. And by the time you actually get to the view that shows you, you know, what's happening in your neighborhood, what's kind of most important to you? It looks a little bit like this. It's kind of a sad view. You can see here that because I've selected a particular postcode, it's showing me nothing outside of that postcode. And if you actually look at some of those icons, they're just kind of a bizarre mix of iconography representing some really strange things. The one on the far right is a stylized spray can for vandalism regardless of whether that's how it's vandalized or not. You've got robbery. You've got a syringe representing narcotics use regardless of what kind of narcotics actually get used. And can anyone guess what that big pink letter P might be up there? Very good. Prostitution. So the city kind of chickened out. They went for an iconography for everything and then they went for the big pink letter P as opposed to like, I don't know, a bra or panties or something for prostitution. So essentially what we did was we kind of flipped this whole thing around and said, you know, this service is not really helping the citizens. It's helping them in the sense that the crime data is available, but it's not helping them in the sense that it's making the crime data hard to understand. So we created an application called Oakland crime spotting that basically flipped the entire process around and said, what if instead of having to answer a whole gauntlet of questions and agree to terms of use, you could basically walk into a situation where you were seeing a map of your neighborhood first thing. So this is a view of Oakland crime spotting. What you can see is we've gotten rid of a lot of that kind of tedious iconography and replaced it with a more kind of supple and reactive and interactive environment. So this whole map can be moved around. There's no more of these kind of neighborhood boundaries that force you to kind of tunnel into one particular part of the city or the other. And then as you move your mouse around in your web browser, you can start to see things like, you know, highlight individual types of crime, highlight kind of affinities between different types of crime. So you can see, for example, robberies here versus prostitution arrests there versus narcotics someplace else, which gives you something like a view of larger patterns around the city. We also thought about how people actually conceptualize their relationship to the city, how they think about, you know, their own needs in terms of things like street crime. So one of the things that the city's application doesn't do is afford you any kind of way of looking at timescales other than, you know, 30, 60, 90 days. We got interested in the idea of how people move through a city and how you can make things more directly available to how they think about themselves. So one interface feature that we introduced is something that we've been calling the pie of time, which is essentially a kind of clickable widget on the map that looks like this and affords you the ability to kind of look at crime according to how you move through the city. So, for example, if you're somebody who's primarily in the city of Oakland because of nightlife, because you want to come out to bars, this might be a view that you want where you're looking at only things from kind of 6 p.m. to about 3 a.m., and ignoring all the crimes that happened after the trains closed or while you're still at work. If you're somebody who's primarily commuting through town, you might look at something that looks like this, where, for example, you split your time and you say, well, I'm there in the morning and I'm there in the afternoon, but I'm not there in between those two situations, so maybe I just want to look at that particular kind of street crime. So it's something that kind of affords you this very high-level synoptic view of a town, but at the same time kind of makes it possible to see these kind of broader patterns and makes it possible to see these broader patterns in a way that you yourself can understand as you work with it. We've done a little bit of experimentation in kind of creating heat maps of this world, creating sort of even broader time scales that kind of move further and further away from that iconographic view and make it more possible to see kind of hot spots around town, but the most rewarding part of this has been actually not this kind of technology and not this kind of response, but something more like what our friend Simon Waddington from downtown has said, which is he's talking about the neighborhood crime prevention council meetings. That's what NCPC meeting means here. And essentially what he's talking about is a world in which he's showing up to these meetings with police actually informed ahead of time. They would have these monthly crime prevention council meetings and there would always be this kind of troubling dynamic that they would have with the police where the police would come and sort of, you know, bring a sheet of paper that showed how many vehicle thefts or how many robberies there have been in a neighborhood and the residents would have to respond to that information and learn that information for the very first time in the context of the meeting where they're supposed to be talking to this beat officer about how to actually mitigate this stuff. So they're learning about it, having to kind of process and respond to it, maybe with just the small subset of people that are in that meeting and it's a very inefficient sort of process. When you can make this data more available for people on a kind of regular basis to get comfortable with before one of these meetings happen, suddenly you have a totally different dynamic where they can actually go in with their own historical analysis as a group of neighbors and when they meet with this police officer who's, you know, maybe got an hour, maybe two to spare, not a whole lot of time, they can immediately jump forward and use this data from the city in a way that will actually give them some kind of, I don't know, conversational basis with the police, some sort of way to move forward into kind of solution talking rather than just problem talking. And I think it really kind of gets to the heart of what it means to use a city as a platform, as both Maria and Jake talked about. And for us personally, especially when we think about city data, we think that the city as a platform is really a shorthand for this idea that a government, a city government, wants to actually be a platform. Being a platform is a thing that cities are good at. It's not a new concept. It's a new term, but historically, cities have always provided a platform. They've always done things like provided, you know, police services and then the taxonomies of talking about crime and talking about location, dividing the city up into districts and kind of providing for a common language that people have to actually relate to each other about this stuff. So to me, city as a platform basically gets to the heart of what governments do best and what city governments do most effectively. So that's a bit of creative destruction. I think there's another aspect to this kind of two-sided relationship that people have with the city government like Oakland, which gets more into kind of creative construction of new data. And what I want to talk about is a project called OpenStreetMap. Hands up, anybody who's not ever heard of OpenStreetMap before? Oh, good. So if you're not familiar with OpenStreetMap, essentially it's sort of like Wikipedia, but for street data. So they've got armies of something like half a million volunteers all around the world are walking around with paper maps, clipboards, GPS units, bicycles, basically creating a complete map of the world based entirely on user submitted data. And it started from a kind of interesting point of conflict in the UK. The founder Steve Coast and some of his compatriots were essentially looking at a government agency in the UK called the Ordnance Survey, which if you know what ordinance means, basically it's the agency that makes maps of what to bomb. And realizing that on the one hand, the Ordnance Survey was the creator of the best, most available kind of highest quality geographic information in the country of England. And at the same time, it was charging the highest rates for it. It was enforcing the most stringent crown copyright rules around it and essentially making it incredibly difficult to use. So Steve Coast's insight was that you could essentially empower people with things like GPS units and moving around town in order to crowdsource the creation of an entirely new map of the world. This background image here is from an early experiment they did where they essentially partnered with a courier agency and just handed all these couriers that had bicycles and cars moving around the city of London, GPS units that they would use to record these tracks and were able to kind of prove to themselves visually that this was actually a legitimate way to collect geographic data, totally free geographic data, licensed in a way that didn't sort of lock it into the same box that the crown copyright Ordnance Survey stuff was locked into. And as they expanded out from the UK starting in 2004-2005, what they found was that open street map was really effective at mapping places that nobody else even bothers to think about. This is an image from Flickr.com where essentially when the 2008 protests were happening in Iran, in Tehran specifically, what Flickr did was they replaced all of their mapping from Yahoo with open street map for places like Tehran specifically. And what Flickr realized was that, you know, if you zoom all the way in on Yahoo maps to Tehran, essentially what you're left with is kind of, you know, the two main streets that cut through town and not a whole lot else beyond that. What open street map offered was the possibility of actually getting very, very high quality crowd source, totally free on the ground data from these places that nobody else bothers to map because nobody's got a, you know, economic rationale to map there. You know, Garmin's not going to go there. Navtech, Tali Atlas, all these large companies that deal with geodata from around the world, they're thinking about Western Europe and they're thinking about China and they're thinking about the US and not a whole lot outside of that. So you've got this massive corpus of data from all around the world called open street map and then you can start to create all of these kind of creative derived works from it. So one of our friends, Brett Camper in New York, created something called 8bitnyc.com where essentially he took a lot of the aesthetics of early 80s and mid 80s of video games like Legend of Zelda, these kind of tile based adventure games and used open street map data to create a fully panamble zoomable map of places like New York and other cities on demand that had a totally different appearance to it but was still based on reality. You could legitimately use this to actually navigate around town, although it was tended to be used more for like poster designs and decorations and things. We've thought about how you use it outside of normal geography. So this is a screenshot from a project that we did with Nike called Nike Grid in London, where essentially Nike was attempting to use the grid of the streets of London as a kind of game board. They had a structure set up where you could use the phone booths to dial in with a special code and then run from phone booth to phone booth and Nike would kind of time how long it took you to get from one to the other. It was a two week long promotion. It was a way to get people up and out and moving around the streets of London and then it used all of this kind of open source geographic data like open street map and others to visualize that stuff and turn it into, you know, television commercials during the course of this game, bus advertising on kind of electronic billboards. So suddenly the open data that was coming from all these citizens was being used by corporations in order to kind of explain what was happening in a city like London. In our own case at Stamen, we've been creating a lot of kind of visual interpretations of this data. So we've created one set of cartography that we're calling toner, which is based on kind of simple black and white Xerox maps that takes away a lot of the sort of street routing needs of things like Google Maps, for example, and replaces them with something a lot more kind of toned down, drops to the background, really thinks about how data moves in front of this stuff. This is a view of Stockholm, a little bit further out from Stockholm and it really starts to show kind of the texture and the dedication of people in open street map creating this stuff, but then also that possibility of once you have all this open data, suddenly you can start to create all these totally new visual interpretations of it. This one's a favorite of ours. It's a Delta I believe in Southern Vietnam and it sort of shows both kind of the obsessive detail that people will go to as volunteers to collect data for open street map, but also what happens when their attention span gets limited. So you can imagine that to the east and west of that Delta, probably it's just as complicated, just as many small channels, just as many, you know, little streams, but somebody really took a personal interest in that specific zone and mapped it. And what they're looking for is that participation for somebody else to go west of that and map the zone to the west, east of that, map the zone to the east. More purely in the realm of decoration, we've been thinking about kind of how you start to bring other visual appearances to bear on a dataset like open street map. So this is something that we've produced called the watercolor maps. Again, that's a bit of Stockholm. This is actually Malmo. It's really, really well mapped in open street map. And what watercolor is doing is essentially saying what other uses are there for this kind of data? What can you do kind of when you need to interpret the data rather than just think about it as kind of a navigational structure or a way of, you know, understanding the city for purely functional reasons? What happens when it becomes decorative or exciting or interesting or innovative to actually interface with this stuff, not for the need of, you know, finding a, I don't know, directions to a pizza place or something. So we've been finding a lot of people starting to use this stuff. For example, the Ansel Adams Museum in Los Angeles has been working on kind of exhibit maps that will show you where all the photography that Ansel Adams took place and where it actually lives using watercolor maps. In the city of Leeds in the UK, they've created something called the Leeds Art Map where they're looking at kind of toner cartography and thinking about it as a suitable base for showing things like locations of street art, locations of sculpture and so forth in the streets of Leeds. Again, using these kind of maps that are not explicitly designed for navigation but more about place finding, having fewer words on them, kind of sinking into the background and making it more possible for creating this stuff in the foreground. And finally, some projects that we've done called Pretty Maps that really focus on this as a purely aesthetic product. This is something that a former colleague of ours, Aaron Straub, coped in where essentially he was looking at sort of location boundaries, neighborhood boundaries, very specific details that he was interested in like motorway junctions and kind of on-ramps and off-ramps of freeways and bringing them together into this kind of crazy new aesthetic territory. These were actually produced as prints by the 20x200 company that produces these things as kind of prints that you can hang on your wall as decoration. But at the same time, if you really look at this stuff, you can see this sort of hyper-dense, local geographic information that's something that wouldn't be possible without these massive open-source engines of innovation creating this stuff. This is DC and Baltimore. So, you know, these two projects, crime-spotting, watercolor maps, the different other kind of interpretive geographies around here. I think really kind of get to the heart of what we think about at Stamen when we think about participatory urbanism. And in a lot of cases, what that really boils down to is this sense of conflict, this idea that on the one hand, you can have a city that doesn't work very well, being kind of augmented by its citizens using things like people's library, creating things like Oakland crime-spotting, where the city is actually starting to kind of realize that it's a platform because people are starting to treat it like one. And on the other side, when you have a conflict between somebody like Steve Coast and an organization like the Ordnance Survey, you know, what happens when people take it into their own hands in order to create entirely new data, create platforms that exist outside of cities and interface with those cities. And we think it really sort of touches on some of the changing relationships that cities and citizens have with each other. This idea that participation actually takes two. You can't just as a city kind of say that you will accept participation. There has to be people that are willing to do it. And by the same token, you can't as a citizenry, create participation all on your own. Somebody at that city level has to be able to kind of dance with you a little bit. Change needs a certain degree of uncertainty. There has to be some kind of tension baked into change that makes it possible. You know, in our case with crime spotting, that tension was the tension between the availability of data and the way that it was presented. In the case of OpenStreetMap, it was the tension between the sudden desire for all this free data and all the new ways that it could be put into use that hadn't been imagined by the traditional owners of data combined with this kind of strange crowned copyright system they had in the UK. And I think that opportunity really feeds on that. I think it's really important to have that kind of tension and those conflicts and those kind of broken systems because it's out of those broken systems that a lot of the possibilities for new opportunity and new interpretations of data come. So, thank you very much.