Information technology

From Cyburbian hilldweller: Getting written work published in traditional media sources and scholarly journals has always been a prerequisite for those aspiring for a career in the ivory tower as a college professor. Likewise, many of the top institutions expect doctoral candidates to demonstrate the ability to produce written work and research that is recognized as a significant contribution to the field.

But written work that is deemed acceptable to the ivory tower does not neccessarily mean it is any better than other writing on nontraditional sources of media. Rather, it means that the academic establishment has signed off on the reputation/prestige of the particular outlet, and that the submission has been sufficiently vetted through a "peer review" or similar process.

From Cyburbian MacheteJames: So who is currently working on the Census Bureau's local address update? We had to change our choice of option and as a result, I'm just now getting started on the process. I know there are a couple of ways to go about doing this (their proprietary MAF/TIGER GIS viewer, ArcGIS, and another one that I've found called CommunityViewer). The biggest hassle looks like it will be formating our address list to meet the Census Bureau's standards. Has anyone managed to actually finish the LUCA update yet?

(Cyburbia Forums original post)

From Cyburbian dogandpony: We have, in my humble opinion, a terrible website, and am seeking examples of best municipal websites to aspire to.

I am seeking sites which are laid out attractively, intuitively laid out, helpful and informative, provide real service to residents and others.

On a related note, what do you all think is (1) important information to get out there, and (2) any trends you've seen that indicate new technologies or providing more service to residents, or existing services provided more effectively throught the web (or email, etc.). Some obvious ones are paying bills online, traffic tickets, GIS access. Somewhere a while back there was a website of a european town which provided real time GIS based locations of buses. Click on the website, you could see your bus is 10 blocks away. Grab your coffee and walk out the door.

From Cyburbian zmanPLAN: With my new job, I have been tasked with creating and maintaining a Microsoft Access database in order to track older and current development projects here. This is something we need as I have been been hard pressed to find some information here in the office (documents, general project timeline information, etc.) as this has been kept on the other planner's computer historically.

Anyways, has anyone used this software in the planning field? I know that the Town Next Door uses it and I am using their system as an example to follow, but I wanted to hear some of the benefits or horror stories from those out there using this system.

The Big Box Evaluator (http://www.bigboxevaluator.org) is an on-line tool, just released by the Orton Family Foundation, designed to be an unbiased information resource for citizens and government officials who want to know more about “big box” retail stores and their potential positive and negative impacts on the local community. This tool allows users to analyze how big box stores may affect a community’s economics, environment and community character, and lets users learn basic facts, test assumptions, and explore interactive models.

Trulia Hindsight (http://hindsight.trulia.com) is an animated map of homes in the United States from the Web 2.0 real estate site Trulia. The animations use the year the properties were built to show the growth of streets, neighborhoods and cities over time.. A slider control lets you see when the majority of development occurred, pause on a specific time frame or focus on only homes built before or after specific years. Very, very cool. There's some other neat tools on Trulia, such as real estate price heat maps.

The New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency Locator (http://sgl.state.nj.us), winner of the APA Planning Excellence Award for Best Practice in 2007, includes several tools: Smart Growth Locator, Smart Growth Municipality Locator, Census Tract Data Locator, Planning Area Locator, Program Eligibility Locator and aerial mapping.

Social Explorer (http://www.socialexplorer.com) offers an easy-to-use interactive interface to US Census data from 1940 to the present. Thematic maps are zoomable from the national level down to individual tracts. The site is evolving, with plans add data back to 1790 for counties, and to 1910 for tracts. If Cyburbia awarded a "Site of the Month" or "Site of the Year" award, Social Explorer would certainly be a candidate.

The National Map (http://nationalmap.gov), "The nations' topographic map for the 21st century", is an online, interactive map service provided by the United States Geographical Survey (USGS). The National Map provides public access to high-quality, geospatial data and information from multiple partners to help support decisionmaking by resource managers and the public. The National Map is the product of a consortium of Federal, State, and local partners who provide geospatial data to enhance America's ability to access, integrate, and apply geospatial data at global, national, and local scales.

geoTorrent (http://www.geotorrent.org) provides peer-to-peer sharing of geospatial data, such as satellite photos and attribute data.

Walk Score (http://www.walkscore.com) calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, and other neighborhood amenities.

The Google Maps/Microsoft Live Search Maps arms race continues. Google's response to Microsoft Live's 3D downtown renderings: Google Street View. Users can take a virtual walk on the streets of New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, and Miami, and navigate within 360-degree scenes of street-level imagery. (From Metafilter)

(Cyburbia Forums original post)

From Cyburbian carfree: As a proud owner of an 2004 ibook and a soon-to-be planing grad student, I was wondering if most (or any) important planning programs had Mac versions or if I was doomed to purchasing another computer.

(Cyburbia Forums original post)

From Cyburbian Scotch: Does anyone have any recommendations for getting started with GIS using some of the free programs on the Internet?

I currently am living out of the States and don't have access to English-language ESRI resources, but I would like to get started learning how to use this kind of software. I've looked at the various websites with free software (namely, opensourcegis.org and whatever comes up on google), but I have no idea if any of the these various programs are worth putting the time into to figure out how to use.

gCensus (http://gecensus.stanford.edu) is a GIS mashup that combines data from the US Census Bureau and places into Google Earth. It is an effort to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software. Currently, only the US Census 2000 Summary File 1 (population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping; according to the site, Summary File 2 will be available soon.