 Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you join us this afternoon for what I'm sure will be an engaging and informative webinar on how communities and developers can engage their members in the pursuit of affordable housing. My name is Josh Thompson. I'm with the Economic Development Division of the Ministry of Jobs and Tourism and Skills Training. I'll be moderating and providing technical support for today's webinar. We're proud to partner with the Office of Housing and Construction Standards and many other partners in delivering the second webinar in our second series on affordable housing. I'm joined in Victoria by Roger Land, who will be introducing this series and moderating questions for our two presenters, Colleen Hardwick and Gary Poonie, who are joining us from Vancouver. Welcome back to many of you who have attended our webinars before, and for the first timeers with us today, welcome, and we hope to see you again. Before we jump into content, I'm going to briefly run through some tips that will help you get the optimal experience with live meetings. So for the best experience, you'll want to dock the attendee and audio and video pane that just helps get them out of the way so that you just have the screen on this slide in front of you and not windows in the way. You want to click and drag the appropriate menu option on the top left hand to the bottom left area and release the pane when the area gets shaded. It's not crucial if you can't get this to work. It is a little tricky sometimes, but it does help sometimes. You can post the question to be answered by the presenter at any time. Just click on the Q&A button in the toolbar on the top left of your screen, type in the question and hit enter. We'll respond to your question as soon as possible. We hope to have about five minutes of questions following each presenter's presentation and then whatever time we have left at the end of the webinar today, we'll answer as many questions as we can, but feel free to type them in as you think of them. And you can provide feedback during the presentation as well. So from the feedback drop-down pane in the upper right hand corner of the toolbar, click the appropriate option from the feedback to presenter drop-down list. And let's just test that right now to make sure that everyone is with me. So just change that to a color other than green right now. And I'll just make sure that that works on our end as well. I'm seeing lots of folks do that. Thank you very much. That's good. You can flip them back to green now. But again, if you're having trouble hearing, feel free to use that to let me know and I'll see what I can do to help you behind the scenes. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Roger Lin. Oh, well, thank you, Josh. As we have some Roger Lam, I'm a manager of the Housing Policy Branch and I'm happy to be here today talking or introducing and hosting the topic of ideas for engaging neighborhoods on affordable market housing. I would like to first recognize our incredible partners that we have inside and outside of government. For this webinar series, we've partnered with BC Housing, the BC Real Estate Association, sorry, the Canadian Home Builders Association of BC. The Union of BC Municipalities, the Urban Development Institute, the Ministry of Community, Sports and Cultural Development, as well as with Josh's team here at Economic Development Division of the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training. So thank you very much to our partners for collaborating with us on this series. And so we're just going to begin with a quick poll. So what we'd like to do is ask you, including you, how many people are with you today for the webinar? So if you could just please click the button that's appropriate for you. I think we'll take a little screen capture and show you the results. Okay, yeah, so it looks like there's quite a few people by themselves but also a few larger groups that are watching us today. Great. So we're going to do our second poll today, which is over the past decade has your community experienced public or neighborhood resistant student-filled development or densification? So if you could just please click the one that applies to you. Okay, so I think if you can see the image there, we see about 62% of people say yes, happens regularly and about 22% happens sometimes. So I would say the vast majority of you here are quite familiar with our topic so should obviously find the presentation very interesting. So I'm just going to briefly introduce the topic before getting on to the presenters. So I guess where we came to or how we arrived at this topic is that really there's been such an incredible focus on affordable housing over the last decade or so and we've really seen this in the last couple of months in particular. Anybody else who's been following the municipal elections? It was a platform in many, many communities with many candidates talking about the issue and it's actually the reason why we started this webinar series, not the municipal elections of course, but actually generally the dialogue that's happening in this province around affordable housing. And this topic in particular is I think of real interest to a lot of British communes because in most of our urban communities and it's probably a fair comment to say, we're getting to a place where we're fairly limited by the supply of new and available land and in our smaller communities or communities where there isn't a supply issue, we have older or aging infrastructure and many communities have now been looking at the option to use infill telemetry or develop inside and using existing infrastructure or upgrading that rather than building out. So I think a number of us in this province, planners and communities and professionals and others are really having this conversation about where should growth go and how should that occur. So we're really having this conversation about change and change management and so I think it's fair to say that this development is happening sometimes at a slower pace where you see a house that might get renovated or updated or changed and redeveloped on a street every week, about every year, every two years, every three years, but it's kind of on a slower and more gradual pace. We're also seeing lots of redevelopment where you might have an entire city block that changes or a number of houses being redeveloped at the same time. So different scales and different paces of redevelopment that are occurring, but I think what's really important is having this conversation about with communities and the neighbors in particular about how this change occurs and how it affects them and how to do it in a way that's constructive and that works for everyone. So I think, you know, without going into too much detail, we can say that a lot of neighbors have concerns about things such as property value, increased traffic or noise, some of the general changes that are occurring in their neighborhoods, as well as safety concerns. So I think what we've discovered and I think what we're going to be talking about today as well is really about a process that allows communities to get engaged and to have a voice and to know that they're being heard and that the plans are being adapted to also suit and meet their needs as well. So getting much further to the topic, I'd like to introduce our presenters who today are going to talk about this, you know, very challenging but interesting conversation. So our first speaker today is Gary Poonie. Since 2008, Gary's been the president of Brock Poonie and if so gets incorporated. He's responsible for driving the firm's growth and managing major client projects. As the president's and senior planner, he provides strategic counseling projects throughout British Columbia. He has expertise in planning principles, policy planning, public complication and advanced skills in negotiation and facilitation. He's got almost 15 years of planning related experience in both the public and private sectors, primarily in the cities of Vancouver and Calgary. He's got a master's degree in environmental design with a specialization in planning from the University of Calgary as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Geography from Simon Fraser University. He's a member of the Canadian Institute of Planners and he's going to speak today about his experience in building housing and engaging communities in the process of doing so. So welcome Gary. Hi. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, five by five. Okay, perfect. So I navigate my own here, correct? Yep, those blue arrows in the bottom left. And you can see me okay, I guess, right? Absolutely, particularly good. I'm so glad I wore a different bow tie than the one I was in the picture. So, yeah, thanks for that intro. I think the perspective that I'm going to bring is from someone who's been a part of the development industry and as development planners, what types of things that we would want you to know when it comes to public consultation and more importantly when it comes to the overall communication of your development projects. So whether it's affordable housing or whether it is a major development project, the methodology and the thinking when you're getting word out on public consultation and communication side for us is the same. So we work with institutions and government agencies as well as developers. So to tell you a bit more about what we do to speak more anecdotally, I think people sometimes see us as marriage counselors. So whenever a city hall and developer on getting along or an agency and a community are not getting along, we get called in to help facilitate. We are also partners. We write a lot of zoning rationale and policy and do a lot of more detailed planning work, a lot of public consultation. I'd say 75% of the work that we do now is largely involved with dealing with the public. And in case you think we get called in like the Navy SEALs do when there's a situation that is gone awry and we're trying to rescue a project at the 11th hour and that happens quite a bit, particularly when something has gone sideways from the public side. That's a bit of a who we are and what we do. Largely what we are is agents of change. Most of you that are on this webinar and a lot of the work in the industry has planners and I've got a planning background are seen as agents of change and so largely we're trying to communicate with the benefits of changes to a neighborhood would be or trying to understand what a positive change could be. And one of the stories I bring up is change was not a good thing. I would still look like this. This is, I'm not referring to the bottom right picture because that's what I look like now. The funny one is supposed to be the one with the big bow tie. And you're probably laughing at the bow tie. Anyone who's been to my parents place, my mother still probably has this picture out in our foyer. So change can be a good thing. Although in 1989 I thought that was actually a pretty cool look. So one of the top five things that I think that you would need to know and the first one is just reminding ourselves and reminding the public that we're living in a growing, changing region. I'll talk a bit about that. Number two is a question that we always ask ourselves is whether or not we can overcome opposition to change and can you really do that? The third, and I don't know, Colleen's going to get into this a little bit later, is the power of social media. That was probably you laughing, Colleen, wasn't it? I think you're the only one we could hear. And to talk about that as a quite effective tool, the fourth is about transit density and change. And there's an important story that we try and tell around transit. And the last one is that there's really no silver bullet. And I got some case studies on specific projects. And we would try to assess the personality of the project and try and bring that forward. First one, the growing, changing region. So most of you who are in the public sector would know that we've had a pretty steady population growth since the mid-1980s. Hasn't flat lined. It's been quite steady. Those of you familiar with the marketing calendar see peaks and valleys when it comes to population growth and dips and upswings. But it's been pretty steady and it's projected to be pretty steady up until 2041. So good population growth, good economic drivers, good in migration, still projected for the city and the region historically. To lay right on with that, obviously, we're in a very land constrained region from a topographical, geographical perspective and then also from a policy standpoint where we've created an agricultural and reserve and areas where we can concentrate development and not have development. Within the city of Vancouver itself, a good example is what's been happening over the last little while. Over the 90s, we were in early 2000s. We were very busy building up the downtown. There were some good sites that were left fallow. Some were zoned, some were going through rezoning, but there's a great effort that we put into our downtown environment. Since that time, we as a firm are looking at moving into more pioneering areas which are outside the downtown core. Whether that are new neighborhoods on the other side of the creek outside the water and outside the peninsula or whether they are elsewhere in the region. So we're constantly reminding ourselves before going to the public that we need to remind them that we're in a growing region with a limited land supply. The math there is quite easy. But what that's leading to from us as an implementer of policy and zoning and development is that there is a lot of change throughout happening in new areas which means rezoning applications. And that inherently means change. So that's the first point. So in the opposition to change and whether or not this is something that you can really overcome and the N word in our industry around NIMBY, it gets thrown around sometimes. But it is just reminding ourselves that there is a population or a group of people that may not be supportive or may not be convinced of what we are doing is positive for their neighborhood. And I don't mean this in a negative term at all, but there is a group of people that we typically have been encountering more recently, particularly around the municipal elections. They've been grouped with political aspirations. And when it comes to municipal politics and land development, it's a huge, huge lightning rod. And it's something we had witnessed in our industry over the last year. Hoping that a four-year term brings some more stability when it comes to people's political aspirations. That's one part of a voice that's supposed to change. But then there's others that are just legitimately concerned and have questions. And they want to understand what the impact would be. You know, that is a group of people that we can certainly try to work with. And there's others that are quite supportive of what we are doing, but typically don't participate in these types of meetings. The point I'm making is that there isn't just one constituency and we largely, historically, have been focusing on trying to convince a group that largely cannot. I just jumped ahead a little bit, but you know, reminding ourselves that we, with anything that we've been undertaking of this is always that resistance, is perhaps something that may not be overcome. So what we've been doing a lot of is trying to get out to a majority, a majority of people that we think are benefiting from the public good. They just, they don't show up at public meetings. They, if you send out invites and flyers and if you just think that they're going to naturally engage in the process, it's very, very naive. I've got a young family and I live in Kitsilano and I have not been to any public meetings in my own neighborhood. And it's not because I'm disinterested, it's because by the time I get home from work, I've got my son's soccer practice, I've got homework and then it's dinner time, then I'm rushing off to do some work and by that time it's about 10 o'clock. And I try and get as much information as I can online. And when Colleen gets into her presentation, I think she'll talk about how virtual is overcoming some of that. People who are not physically able to be attending these meetings. So what we have been doing is proactively doing reconnaissance in a neighborhood and identifying who we think would be potentially benefiting from the work that we're doing. It doesn't mean that we're just off poaching potential supporters. It's talking to legitimate groups that we think would agree with us that our work is a good idea and proactively identifying them and meeting them. So we're these people. I talked a bit about young families who may be benefiting from new policies. We've had great success in getting up to students. We're going to become future homeowners and getting them engaged. The local business community is someone that is quite galvanized when it comes to certain causes. And so we provide to go out to them. Sometimes in a project where we've got a significant public benefit around affordable housing, we go out to agencies or other providers or people who would benefit from that. And largely what we find is that that public, which is a general public, has been quite disinterested in the traditional public meeting format. They do still come to meetings. People still do that. It's still one tool, but it's not the only one. So we've also been, have a bit of a traveling road show and a street team and have set up a core of our staff on certain projects to go off and meet people. And we just go off and find them ourselves. And they are anywhere where there's a congregation of a good group on weekends, weekends or evenings, shopping malls, community centers, organizing smaller meetings and coffee shops, hitting big fairs that may be coming in summers and festivals, even concerts that we've gone off to. It's surprisingly how many people when you take the information out to them are quite curious with the information that we're putting forward. Very different than the old traditional public open house format. So some of the other approaches I've just listed off a few of them, but these are all things that we are doing. Most of these things I'd say we're doing this month. We're door knocking and canvassing neighborhoods at the old school approach. We've identified and targeted certain groups. We're having traditional open houses. We have booked out storefront and set them up as venues for consultation. We're setting up small meetings of about a dozen people at a time in coffee shops. They get into a more intimate collaborative discussion. We've recently had some co-design working sessions, which would be a workshop or a charrette. We are also setting up some kiosks at major outdoor events, and then of course, social media. It's very different than just having a traditional open house or a big project and then preparing yourself for a public hearing. I bring this up as an example as when it comes to getting word out to people, the project we were involved in had been turned down five, four, and it came to us and said, our project conforms to the EOCP and we thought we were fine with this high-rise application near the hospital. I thought it was quite a benefit near this large scale institutional use and it got turned down. So I'm going to go ahead and get back to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming down. We got killed at the public hearing, and there's a group of people who called themselves the Sun people that effectively were in a campaign against our project and had it cover the issues of the council meeting. So then we had to dial back a little bit, a lot actually, and have another public meeting. And then when Austin started talking to people, we think we would benefit from this and I've listed in a number of those people there. And after all of that effort in six months worth of work, there was some change instead of five-form favorites, five-form posts. The reason I bring this up is that there's, people will do anything at public hearings. And I'm sure a lot of you have more stories when it comes to, comes to this. We had someone who had both public hearings, the failed one, and the one that was successful, held up her child at the podium and said, if you build this high rise, my child will never see the sun again. And in this graphic, the child is so scared of not seeing the sun, she has also pooped her diaper. So there's, there's the dramatics that we have to go through at our own public hearings and, and the theatrics are at grad levels. I think this group was also very effective on the social media side. And our team, to be honest with you, was not proactive and effective in getting the message out, but by the time we tried to, it was too late. By the time we had engaged, it was too late. You know, I wish that we had had the chance of using PlaySpeak on, on this project because it would have been a very effective tool for us. There's a handful of other projects that I'm going to list where we have done it. So the point I'm going to make here, without taking too much away from Colleen's presentation, is that the social media message, particularly if it's a wrong message, can multiply exponentially, exponentially quite quickly. And then before you know it, the, the wrong message has gotten out there. There's, the slide's not moving. Sorry, it's just hung up here. Josh, are you there? So this is the forum office of the grant. Just to illustrate how misinformation can get out quite quickly. By the time some of your opponents starts talking on a project, it looks like this. And by the time it gets to a public hearing, people are referring to it this way. The wrong message is getting out really quick and it, it can really hinder any of your efforts in terms of getting a positive message out there. So in short, how we've been using PlaySpeak and other social media tools is to proactively get our message out. And then number two, it's a tool that isn't going away but it's increasingly popular and it's become mainstream and it's an easy way for you to engage a large group of people. Very quickly around transit and, and the reason I put this in here is it's a big part of our communication these days and how planners have to become storytellers in terms of growth in the region and change and how your projects are, are assisting in the overall growth and health of the region. Most of our growth nodes are around transit stations. So we really need to get familiar with our transit story. So if not only is the access to transit crucial for future development, it's a requirement and on top of that we're finding in a marketplace it's one of the big questions we have around young buyers who are not using vehicles and want good effective access to transit. So when it comes to density and change and communicating the benefits of change when you're around transit don't forget that part of the story. Last point is I'm going to quickly run through some projects we've worked on and we refer to this internally about assessing the personality of your project and each one is different and there's no silver bullet when it comes to public consultation. Each project is different and you need to sort of draw upon your own experience and background to figure out what the best way is to engage a certain neighborhood. Oak Ridge Center was a big one for us. One of the biggest rezoning in the history of Vancouver certainly over the last two decades, one of the biggest ones. Our approach on this one was to set up a kiosk in the mall. So even I was there personally almost every Saturday or every second Saturday for about a year and a half. In total we had 33,000 people pop-fying. The open houses had 2,000 people. You can see how effective the mall model was for us. Social media, we started it off with PlaySpeak and then the owners of the mall continued with their own social media conversation on Twitter at Oak Ridge 2025 which led to about 50,000 impressions. At the end of the day with a project that was this big, there were only 75 speakers of the public hearing and I would say that that was a good success because there was no sticker shock. We were pretty clear about what we were doing and got the word out to a lot of people. Whether they liked it or not, we weren't hiding behind anything. Fraser Mills and Coquitlam for us was, we refer to this project that we did for the BD Group, it was about being in the trenches. There was a group of people that were very passionate about what the history of this site was. It was once a mill town and people lived here and the open houses had 300 attendees but it was the people who had strong romantic attachment to the site and we were able to engage with them who became our big champions in the community and we worked with them for about three years. So our approach on this one was about being in the trenches. Marine Gateway, the PCI project down at SkyTrain Station on Cambium Marine. A significant project that had a lot of opposition and our assessment of the personality here was that we think it's being epicentered around a few blocks of misinformation. So this was an old school engagement for us where we went door knocking and we had crews of about 20 people and went off talking to everyone about our project. The information was put forward, actually it wasn't promotional but we were effectively able to get into one-on-one conversations where it was largely a single family neighborhood. So that was the old school engagement. The work that we had been doing for BC Housing on Riverview I would call as New School. The old school and new school and new school and that we were using PlaySpeak. We, I think they're using, we are using our own online function through BC Housing now. We're still in process on this one but the public consultation has been quite effective for us. We're mixing in open houses with kiosks at the mall with a great resource library that is online and then had an amazing co-design session with Stanley King's group where they drew people's ideas and their aspirations of the types of things that they would want to see here. And now we're in the process of developing a vision for that. The Riverview District in New Westminster, I would, so if one of them was Riverview I call New School, PCI was Old School, this one is Preschool. And Preschool in that we were off meeting with the community before we even had any plans. It was a small neighborhood, a tight community and we set up a community advisory group and thought that this is, it's almost like it's small town planning where we need to go off and talk to people and introduce ourselves and build a lot of trust. So we were meeting with the community quite often before we had even developed any plans. So in summary, I've listed the points that I had brought up earlier, just the, in general, that the approach that we've been taking on when it comes to public consultation on major projects. And that's it for me. Thank you. So I'll show you there. Colleen, is that you? I can hear you. I can hear. Sorry about that, folks. Yes, thank you, Gary. That was a wonderful presentation. We have no questions right now and actually in the end of the time we're just going to move on to Colleen's presentation and then we'll take the questions after her presentation for both Gary and Colleen. So with that I'd like to introduce Colleen. Colleen Hardwick is an urban geographer, a film producer, an internet entrepreneur and a founder and CEO of PlaySpeak. This is the first location-based public consultation platform. So today Colleen's going to speak about PlaySpeak as a tool to engage the public and how it helps to positively address community resistance to needed housing projects. And so Colleen's going to start with a bit of a video for us. So Josh is going to throw that up. And I think you're going to have to actually start the video yourself. Yeah, that's right. So it's going to load up Vimeo in your screen there. And feel free to push Play on that video. It will play within the screen. And it's a short video. It's only 90 seconds, so we will see you shortly. And welcome back, everyone. I hope that worked for the majority of you, if not some of you. And I hope Colleen will be able to provide a link to that video when we send out some follow-up materials. If that didn't work, it was admittedly the first time we've tried it. So we do hope it worked. And I will now pass it back to Roger, who will probably pass it right on to Colleen. That's right, Josh. Over to you, Colleen. Well, I hope that everybody did get a chance to see that. Hi, everybody. Because it really sets up the conversation nicely for what I'd like to talk about here today, is that most people in the communities feel like they are out of the loop. They are very suspicious that changes are happening without their knowledge or involvement. And so PlaySpeak has been developed really as a step towards trying to make it real for people. We do public consultation because it's supposed to provide us with reliable evidence to inform our deliberation and ultimately influence our outcomes. Whether those outcomes are decisions about rezonings or development permit applications, for example, or broader based around policies such as community renewal policies and things of that nature. So this feedback loop that we see on the screen right now is really there to illustrate the way that it's supposed to work. But unfortunately, it doesn't. Most of the time, people feel that decisions are foregone conclusions. They're just doing consultation because it's a box that's got to be checked. And as a result, there's very little trust in the process. So as we've examined this, we started to understand that it's important to build legitimacy and trust in the process, which comes from turning that consultation into hard, defensible evidence. So when we started analyzing the problem, we started looking at our conventional methods around public consultation. And I don't know if you can read the fine print on this. It says, I don't have a question per se. It's more of a 15-minute incoherent ramble. And I think that speaks loud and clear to anybody that's been through the public meeting public hearing process. It's going to be quite painful. And as Gary observed, the opportunity for the usual suspects to get up on the stage. So public meetings, again, not representative, not accessible to people like Gary's example with small families. Door knocking, despite the fact that they've got lots of people going out and door knocking, these days, people live in condos or high-rises. You can't get past the lobby where they think it's a home invasion or someone trying to sell them something. So there's a lot of resistance to even opening the door to strangers. And then we used to have these things called phone books and landlines that would allow us to pull people within specific geographical areas. But fewer and fewer people have those anymore, especially younger people. So it's demographically skewed towards older people who are more represented in traditional public consultation methodology. So we knew that if we wanted to reach people, we needed to reach them online. But there's, you know, just as difficult pathologies around online consultation as there are around the in-person side of things. In particular, we've seen the rise of the trolls. Anybody that's dealt with anything controversial has seen the trolls. And they have playbooks right now. And it's all about enraged, disrupted, and discredited. And trolls can exist in a climate of anonymity. They can do, and they can often set up multiple personalities because there's no authentication around their identity. Furthermore, we've seen things like community plans, for example, where the city's done a survey, a white label, what we call white label survey, like a survey monkey survey. And they've observed they've got 1,500 responses. But when they look at the data, over 1,200 are from the same IP address. And this has become a problem because it's without any kind of identity authentication, it's quite easy to skew the results. And that's what one side or the other is trying to do to dominate the outcome. And thirdly, we've looked at social media. We love social media for getting the word out. It's a great way of spreading the word. But if you're looking at it for hard evidence, again, you're going to be sadly disappointed. Because if you're doing sentiment analysis, for example, based on Facebook or Twitter, it's garbage in, garbage out. It's interesting, but it's not going to provide you with what you need, which is hard evidence. So in terms of evidence-based decision making, what you really need to be able to do is to connect digital identity to place and prove it. And that seems like a simple process, but it's not for a very important reason, and that is online privacy. We have, under the Freedom of Information and Personal Privacy Acts, some very strong rigor around personal privacy. So the solution that we've been working under with the development of PlaySpeak is described as privacy by design. And what that means is that people sign up and they verify themselves to place, but their private information is not shared with the proponents of the consultation. And when I say proponent, I mean broadly whoever's conducting the consultation. Now that proponent is going to get verifiable location-based data, again, the hard evidence they need, but they never have to touch the private information of the individual, and that's a very, very important part of the innovation that PlaySpeak represents. And I should mention that this innovation has been supported for the last three years from our incubation by the National Research Council of Canada. So when you sign up with PlaySpeak, it takes you through a series of automated and then opt-in checks to verify that it's a real address, that this latitude, longitude takes you through an email loop. In the background, we're using services like MaxMind to detect any IP address fraud. We'll see quite often, for example, people might put in a Vancouver address, but their IP address is in China or, you know, New York City or somewhere completely divergent. So those ones are flagged as being offside. It also allows social media like Facebook and Twitter for you to create your account in the first place, but it's using truly you and other Vancouver-based start-up to detect any bad actors in social media. And then you can add additional layers of authentication, particularly home phone and mobile phone where we're using Twilio in the background, another third-party service. And where you don't have a physical address in more rural locations, we're using a geolocation function that's based on the GPS in either your computer or mobile device. So this is an ongoing process of increasing verification and some consultations require more rigor than others. We found actually things like cell towers for the telecommunications companies require more rigor. The model that we're working with here is different than what you would have seen traditionally. Instead of setting up the standalone website, PlaceBeak is a two-sided model and a geosocial model as we describe it. So that once people have signed up and verified themselves, they can choose to be notified of multiple consultations according to where they live and according to their preferences. So once I've signed up, I create my profile. Here I am and I put in my profile that I want to be notified about new consultations, one, five, ten, a hundred kilometers from my home. I can also choose by keyword like housing or transportation or education, anything that comes up that's of interest to me. I will be notified once a week or not at all. It's really up to the individual to make those determinations. They can determine their privacy settings. They can determine their verification settings. They can plug in their social media. The overarching aim here is to put it in the hands of the individual to stay informed and to be able to engage based on their location. Because how do we let them know now? Well, we put up a sign on the property or we put an ad in the paper, we send out a flyer and what we heard, which was echoed in that little animated video at the beginning is nobody notified me. I didn't know anything about it and I wasn't consulted. So that's really at the core of what we're trying to do here. Let people know in the first place. So on the other hand, you're the proponent. You're putting up a consultation topic to engage with people. So this is a little screenshot of a topic setup screen. So you'll put in your team, whether people or administrators or moderators or contact information and all of these pieces along here are basically fill in the blanks. We've tried to make it as simple as possible so that people like planners don't need to have any specialized IT knowledge to be able to set up and manage a topic themselves. The key things though are to determine the scope of participation. So in this instance, the city of New Westminster wanted to restrict participation exclusively to their residents. But internally, they wanted to be able to understand how people's opinions in different neighborhoods varied. So each one of these colored polygons represents a different neighborhood in New Westminster. So when they get down to their reports down here, all of the data that they're collecting, whether that's quantitative or qualitative data, whether it's polls or surveys or discussion forums, ideation, user input mapping, all of these different functions, when you gather the data, it's all going to be segmented spatially according to the divisions on the map. So when you're thinking about setting up a topic, might be a rezoning with only, say, a two block radius that you're looking at, the starting place is the map. Who do we want to hear from? Do we want to restrict participation and say that nobody outside of this area is available to participate? Or do we want to open it up more broadly? And other examples, you might get right down to the, within a neighborhood, you might break it into quadrants. It really depends on what you want to know when you get to the reporting end of things. We've organized our whole approach here along the lines of the IAP-2 spectrum of public impact. And for those of you that are not familiar with, the IAP-2 is the International Association for Public Participation. And that spectrum goes inform, consult, involve, collaborate, empower. So the first step is getting the word out to people, notifying people, we're building through what's called the network effect. Every new consultation that comes on brings in more participants, more users who can then be informed about more consultations. So we're building on a growing base of approximately 10,000 now registered users in the Vancouver Lower Mainland, for example, that can be notified as you set up a new topic page. But beyond that, you want to get the word out in words and pictures about what is the nature of the consultation. And I should say that we encourage people to do that as early as possible. Don't leave it until the last minute unless you're just asking for trouble that way. What you want to do is to get in early and start to describe the nature or the narrative of the consultation. Educate people. What kind of density are we talking about? What the heck is FSR anyway? Let people know. So think about it as a narrative of telling the story in words and pictures. And with both offline and online components. So you still want to tell them who to talk to in real life, what events are happening in real life. You still want to spread the word through social media and through search, which is really what drives the internet and the way that people find things. And you also want to include all of the documents, links, photos, videos, everything that you can that helps inform people about the nature of your consultation. The next step is our consult and then involve. So you're consulting, you're receiving feedback in a variety of forms. That might be simple polls like you see in the online newspapers, surveys. PlaceBeak has integrated a couple of different survey platforms with more on the way. Notably Fluid Survey, which is used by many municipalities in British Columbia and across Canada that was recently bought by SurveyMonkey. But our objective there is to make it possible to use other tools within the PlaceBeak platform in umbrella so that you're able to avail yourself to the larger network of and growing network of users. There's the notice board for user-generated content. We've seen this used, for example, in Chilliwack when they had a contest for people to upload their favorite pictures of Chilliwack or videos. PlaceIt, which is a user input map, which allows people to put notes on the map saying, I think the bike lane should go over here or I think this would be a better location for the park. And discussions which are moderator-led, so you put in the questions and people respond and through threads and they can thumb up and thumb down the comments and the discussions. That's more bi-directional communication, but you can see the location corresponding to the polygon on the map of where people, where their discussion comments are coming from. I should note at this point that because people have signed up and verified themselves to Place, we have not had the problem with trolls that you will find in the free-for-all, that is Facebook or Twitter and other forms of social media. We've really found that when people are engaging here, they are leading to a much more civil kind of dialogue. We haven't had a lot of profanity or uncivil commentary. When you get down to the end of your process, you're able to export all of your data in a variety of forms depending on who you are. Most planners or engineers are very happy for an Excel spreadsheet, but communications people are gonna want something more in Word or PDFs. But again, all of that information, regardless of what it is, is gonna be spatially segmented. And you're able to plug in your Google analytics for those of you that have web knowledge so that you can track other things like time on site, bounce rate and broadly where people are coming from on the internet. I should say we've also built other tools that we have an activity map that allows you to drill into any individual polygon and see how you're doing, how many users have signed up, how many discussion questions have been engaged in, how many poll or survey questions have been answered. And then in that way you can go in and target your promotion, for example, on an area that might be underserved. And at the end of the day, we really encourage all the proponents to let people know that they're having an impact and that they're being listened to. Again, go in early, you've got the ability through this platform to not only be notifying people, but as they connect, entering into an ongoing dialogue with them, but most importantly, leading back to that original feedback diagram that I showed, it's important to let people know that they're being heard. So what we are trying to do in building this platform is to build an open and inclusive platform to make it accessible 24-7. We found very often an example would have been with the newest Minster consultation where we had 300 people show up at a public meeting and complete 30 hard copy questionnaires. The same time we had over a thousand people come to the website and complete over 200 surveys. So we know that accessibility and being able to reach people online is important. It's dynamic in that we're receiving real-time feedback. It has transparency as a core value so that people can see how other people are contributing. It's not like the black box of market research panels, for example. And ultimately, the process is defensible and that comes back to the legitimacy claims that are core to what we're trying to accomplish. So a couple of examples before my time is up. Oak Ridge was one that Gary mentioned. This was an early project, I think one that we worked on when we were still back in our prototyping phase. But it allowed the developer and Brookpuni to understand where feedback was coming from online, how people in different neighborhoods were informed or responding. Was it different with the people that were in the immediately affected areas or was there more to be learned from the perspective of people throughout the city? Quite often, just as you might have people bring in a busload of supporters to a public meeting, you get the same kind of thing online. But with PlaySpeak, the importance here is you'll know where those people are coming from and you'll be able to put them into perspective. No one's saying that you have to discount people because they're outside of the affected area, but at least you know. And having that information is incredibly important to inform your process. Another interesting one that we were involved with was the Musclean Block F consultation out at the University Endowment Lands. In this case, if I was to expand this map, you'd see they wanted to know how people in the, I think they broke it into three or four different zones within the University Endowment Lands, but they also wanted to know by local area neighborhood within Vancouver and within the 22 municipalities of Metro Vancouver because obviously University UBC is a destination for all of the region, even though the development would impact people in the immediate area. So this was a really interesting one for us to understand as well. And again, the data was very valuable to the team that was involved, the planners, architects, landscape architects, and the PR and public consultation people broadly. So all of these I should point out is we've published all of our findings, all of our case studies on the PlaySpeak website, and so I would invite people to take the opportunity at their leisure to familiarize themselves with some of the learnings that we have accumulated. And finally, I just wanted to touch on another one that Gary had, which is the ongoing Riverview consultation. Again, this was one where BC Housing, the proponent, wanted to hear from people throughout the region, not just people in the immediate affected area of Cleveland. This one is ongoing. I know that they have been conducting surveys and discussion forums online, but also working together with their offline public meetings and open houses and the regular kind of activities that you'd expect as part of the consultation process. The key point being that we need to do both online and offline for all the reasons that we've talked about. And again, with PlaySpeak, we've been developing a tool that allows us to be informed by geography and also to ensure that we're receiving verifiable evidence that's not being skewed by trolls or other people trying to dominate the outcomes. So there's some information, if anybody wants to be in touch with me or learn more about PlaySpeak, welcoming to that. So that's it, Josh, back over to you. Great, thank you for calling for the great presentation. So now we're gonna open it up to questions for the speakers. So if you can participate the opportunity to hit the little Q&A tab at the top of your screen there and write in your questions, we'll be happy to read them out for our presenters. And maybe just to get things going, I'll ask the first question. I know we have a lot of folks on the line today that are from small and rural communities. And I know the focus of today's presentation was largely on larger urban centers and some of the more complex public processes. But for both of our presenters, do you have any things that you'd like to share with the smaller communities and how applicable are the tools that you've talked about today? Shall I go? Yeah, go ahead and start Colleen and I'll go after. Sure, well we've seen a place be accused broadly now in places as small as the village of Cumberland on Vancouver Island, that you have Duncan with maybe 5,000 residents. One of our most active municipalities is Fort St. John up in Northern British Columbia, which is about 18, 19,000 residents. And they've conducted four consultations, again realizing that the more consultations you do, the network effect helps cross-pollinate and build up your user base so that you don't have to go and recruit people right from scratch because that's always a challenge with any new consultation is how are you gonna recruit your participants and again to be able to provide reliable evidence that you really are reaching the affected people. Pretty much everybody's online if it's not through their laptop computer, it's through their mobile device. So the arguments around the digital divide are much, much less relevant than they were even five years ago. We've looked at demographics like age and socioeconomic status. We've even looked at homeless people who we've determined may not have a street address but have an email address and have access to being online. So what we're seeing in the smaller communities and in rural communities that they are online, they appreciate the ability to be consulting online because it means they don't have to drive into town. And that's true also. We've seen that out in places like Langley and Chilliwack in the Fraser Valley. The people in town are using it but it's the people that are out of town as well that value the opportunity to be consulted without having to drive into a public meeting. And for us, I'd say, I'm calling to write, we've been using social media on all of our projects just because it's a smaller, more rural or remote community. You don't think that they're not well connected when it comes to an online conversation. In fact, it could be easier for them if they are a little bit more remote. So in words that we've been doing in Calgary where they've developed a tool for, to the communications firm for an online open house so they've been able to get out to people in the developing communities on the edge of the city. There's been far more participation online than there has been in person. Such one point, so don't forget social media. Number two is if you're asking me to help put a plan together in a small community and what would we do? Social media for sure is one part of it. I would suggest that you still need to get on the trenches and have conversations with people. There is a group that still wants to come to a meeting, that still wants to meet face to face and may also not be engaged. It's our responsibility to get the word out to as many people as possible. Out in Cochrane, Northwest of Calgary, we went out to an agricultural fair over the summer and where it's the biggest event that they would be having to stay a word out about a potential project that we were just starting. And what we found is like within a couple weeks, that conversation had spread to everyone quite quickly. So there is a bigger effort that needs to be made, I think in the trenches in the smaller communities and it comes back to assessing your community, assessing demographics and assessing the personality of your project and your constituents. Perfect, thank you. We have a question here from David from Terrace and he's really asking about, they recently had a process that was quite successful with PlaySpeak, they had over 600 unique hits, but they had a little bit less interest or very little interest in people signing up and engaging in the online discussion. So any suggestions on how to encourage people to use PlaySpeak for more than just a site for information? Absolutely, providing them with more to do is the first thing I would suggest. Don't, if you've got a series of discussion questions, for example, that you want to engage with people, don't put them all up at once, put in one a week and keep notifying people that there's something else for them to do. Similarly with polling questions, renew those, keep it active and the other thing is I refer to cross-pollination in the network effect. If you've just done one consultation, that's not enough. You need to do, say, when you get to about three, you really start to cross-pollinate and build up that user base, but it's not gonna happen on just one. And that's why we've seen with cities like Fort St. John that's up to their fourth and going on to their fifth now that they've been able to continually grow that user base. So we found also people might come in for something different. They might come in for a school board consultation or a transit-related consultation or wastewater management, whatever it is. I think when it comes to municipalities, the big recommendation there is try and do multiple consultations. That's really what's gonna help build your user base and again, once you've got them, keep them engaged and build on that so that they can see that they actually are having an impact. One more thought on that. I don't know how up to speed everyone is on open data. Like governments at all levels are starting to publish data in machine readable form. So what we've been working, our most recent project with the National Research Council was our open data strategy. So what we're endeavoring to do now is to take feeds of consultation information. So say it's rezoning. Every time there's a new rezoning application, we can plot that on the map, automate the process, plot it on the map, let people know that that's going on and again, according to their preferences and then the proponent, the city in that case, can choose to activate the feedback loop, i.e. turn on the surveys or polls or discussion forums or not. But it's keeping people informed in the first place that we'll then engage them so that they will move along that continuum from informed consults involved, collaborate to empower. Great, thank you Colleen. And the next question I think is probably a good one for Gary from Marsha and I think she's really asking, how does your development team determine which model of engagement you use in a particular community? Yeah, I partly got into it with my previous answer where we're trying to set the personality of the project and the personality of the community. And again, there's no silver bullet we're drawing upon a lot of experience. So there's about 10 different tools that we can bring forward and maybe we use four or five as a part of our project. But using example, if we're going out again for a development project largely in a single family neighborhood, it's probably on the edge of the community. The PCI project I mentioned was a good one. A lot of the people are accessible through door knocking. So we do get it to people that way. If there is elementary schools, community centers, high schools nearby, we'll try and reach out to them also through advertising because the kids will take notice of home to their parents. So the makeup then, when they do that, we know they're large in a single family neighborhood. That is how we would approach a more traditional low-density neighborhood that's on top of an open house, on top of social media. If we are looking at redeveloping a major or mid-sized commercial center and we've got some commercial space on top of the open house and the other stuff that would be in the trenches, maybe we'll set up something in one of the commercial units and have that set up to augment what we're doing. So the standard for us, social media, key messaging, public open house, stakeholder meetings, that happens with all of them. How we augment it really depends on the community. We have, in big projects, we're involved with the Honest Stated Smirvish Village Project in Toronto. And when we went off and met with the stakeholders early, just to introduce ourselves, because we're from out of town, we also asked them, what's the best way to engage you? How would you like to be informed? And for them, it came back that the open house model works, the newsletter drop works, but they largely felt that the more information we could put online would be better. So I think what you do is you determine the three or four standards that you approach is that you would use all the time. And understanding the neighborhood and asking the public how they want to be engaged, you just augment it. So for us, about half of it doesn't really change. The other half depends on the environment. When you're dealing with condos and higher density areas, you have to get out to the strata councils that are nearby and proactively go off and meet them. And there's, like Colleen said, there's no way you can go off and do an off with them. So that's, hopefully, that's useful. Thanks, Gary. Colleen, I just have a bit of a question here from a local government who's interested in place-speak and I think they're interested in knowing, essentially how many months do they need to purchase place-speak for a typical type of affordable housing application? And I think you mentioned it in your presentation, but maybe remind us on how exportable the data is for using in different ways of analysis and so forth. Well, the exporting of data question is easy. You click on export data and there you've got it. The amount of time depends on the nature of the project. Sometimes it's, you know, if this is a single topic, it could be, you know, three months, it could be a year. It depends on the nature of the project. Again, if this is a municipality that hasn't done it before, I'd suggest that they should give it as much time as possible and also be looking, as I say it, at the potential of cross-pollinating with other topics in the area. Because the more opportunities that you create for engagement, the greater your results are going to be. But at the end of the day, what I want to be able to see, and you know, I relate this back days on the Development Permit Board, is I want to be able to see, here's a map that shows the spatial distribution of respondents. And, you know, here's our understanding about how those responses differed by neighborhood. Again, depending on the nature of the community. But those are really the great benefits. It's more than just social media. This is an analytical tool that's providing you with reliable data. So I just wanted to put that in there. It's not just social media. Social media is great, as I say, for getting the word out. But it's not going to provide you with much in terms of reliable evidence. Thanks, Colleen. So I think I just have one more question here that I'd like to ask. And it's one that we've been pondering as we've been looking at these slides and these presentations. Really, you know, you've been in the, both of you have been in the industry for, you know, over a decade doing exactly the type of engagement work. Have you noticed the, you know, the principles or the elements of public engagement changing over this period of time? Certainly I think the conversations that we hear are different, but have the fundamentals of public engagement changed? You want to go for that, Gary? Yeah, good question. I wouldn't say that the fundamentals have changed, but there are some things that are different. The work that we've done, and I talked earlier about us being agents of change, you know, back in the 1990s there wasn't really a lot that happened in our industry, mid-90s to late-90s. Early 2000s was we started having some strong economic growth, good in migration, and then we had this unprecedented growth in the residential market back in 2004 to about 2008. So it was like a huge four-year run. In that four or five-year span, there was a lot of change. So if you remember that people were very interested in their real estate, development was seen as a good economic driver. There was a lot of publicity and buzz around our work. But what it meant was a lot of change came into our neighborhood, and I think that there's been some fatigue from that pace of change. The easy sites were gone. I talked about the downtown sites largely have been built up, and they were going off into pioneering areas. So the areas, particularly in Vancouver, and it's a lot of the inner city areas in the suburbs that had been identified for redevelopment and growth were largely used up, gone. And now we're coming in with new policy and rezoning and trying to play catch-up. And there's also a deficit in the social infrastructure in certain municipalities as well as physical infrastructure. And what that causes a lot of social unrest and nervousness and anxiety around the work that we do also leads to a lot of political issues as well. So where the fundamentals of consultation where you go off and go and seek feedback from people on your development proposal and in bringing forward to a public hearing, those fundamentals haven't changed. The way that I think people will perceive the work that we do based on the pace of growth that we've had to face over the last decade and the pace of change that they've had to experience is leading to a lot of issues. So there's a bigger onus that is put on us in the industry and as planners and people working in municipalities on the public side to go off and communicate better about the benefits of this change in growth. So the public is much more informed when it comes to our work and expect to be engaged quite a bit more. If anything that I'm finding that has changed and to be honest with you, it's the political realities of the work that we all have to take on, it's become a big lightning rod. And the amount of consultation that we have to take for big projects and small has gone up. You know, we're looking at a minimum of two, usually three or four open houses and public meetings, multiple stakeholder sessions, social media that accompanies everything. So where the, and then all this comes down to the preparation for a game day political showdown at a public hearing. Like that whole process has not really changed at all. Those bones and fundamentals are the same. I would just say that the amount of work that we've got to do and how some of the public views our work is the part that's really different for me. Thank you. Gary, Collie, did you want to add anything to that? Well, it just, I mean, how much has it changed? It depends on how far back you go. I think back to when my dad was working on South Falls Creek and in the early to mid-70s and doing the land assembly for what we now enjoy as a housing area, which at the time, of course, was an industrial area that was fallow and going out of use. They, I think the big lesson there that has carried on though is that if you start early and talk it through with people, involve them in the narrative whether in those days we had no social media and we had no online. So as all meetings and it was all in, you know, having space time with people, that was the way. It was building trust through early engagement with people, educating them and working it through. That's become so much more difficult really in some ways because of the internet and social media is because it's so fractured and there's so much misinformation that is put out there and people have short attention spans and you can't really get into any kind of deliberation or genuine dialogue around things. It's going to be an ongoing problem, especially as we get to legitimacy claims around making these kinds of decisions, change is the only constant. We are change agents but we are going to be responsible as planners whether in the private or the public sector to be able to really demonstrate that we are making decisions in the common good. I personally see with my crystal ball more emphasis online coming around digital identity authentication. I believe within five years we're going to be looking at more online decision making if not outright voting. We're going to be seeing the possibility of doing location based referenda and petitions online. So I would just be expecting as we look down the line in the future of how the nature of engagement over land use change occurs that it's only going to become more online as we move forward and changes as Gary has actually said inevitable. Great, thank you Colleen. Great answers. So I think we've come to the end of our webinar today. We've had some great presentations and some great questions and answers. I'd like to thank our audience again for dialing in today and participating but I'd also like to thank our speakers both Gary and Colleen for taking the time to prepare the presentations and come on and talk honestly about quite a challenging topic. And for those folks that there's a number of questions about the cost of play speak, I'd encourage you to connect with Colleen after the call and I'm sure she'd be more than happy to talk to you about her product. For those of you that are professional planners, just a reminder that this is worth 1.5 PIBC organized and structured learning credit. This is the last of the 2014 webinars for this current series that we have. So we'll be back in touch in the spring with our new series but with that in mind, I really strongly encourage you. Those have been on the line watching these over the last year and have a really good idea of some topics they'd like to see us cover next year or maybe if you yourself would like to be a presenter on a webinar. Dale Anderson's email address is right there and you can just send her a note, let her know of your idea or that you're interested in presenting and we'd be happy to get in touch with you in the next little while as we plan for next year. I think Dale just let me know that the survey has been sent out so please take some time and fill that survey in. Your feedback is really valuable to us in helping us, especially now as we're looking forward to a new season and some new topics. And so with that I'm going to thank you all for being online with us today and I'm going to pass over to Josh. Yeah, thanks again. Again, I'll extend similar thanks on behalf of the Economic Development Division to our presenters, Colleen and Gary. Thank you so much for taking the time to work with us in putting on this webinar and also to our attendees for tuning in today.