Philadelphia 2035 Cliffs Notes Edition

By Alex Hillman on Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 in business, philadelphia with 2 Comments

No, not THAT Cliff.

The City of Philadelphia just published a ~25 year plan, the first of its kind in half a decade.

While I’m not one for that style of long-term planning, it’s remarkable as a short-term planner with long-term vision to know what’s going on inside the heads of City Hall. The problem?

It’s a 200 page, ~40 megabyte PDF. Link to PDF.

A nicely designed one, I’ll give them that, but gosh what an unfortunate side effect of such large scale planning. Don’t they know that I spend my days reading blogs and tweets? 200 pages is basically an encyclopedia to me. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

I joked on Twitter that documents of this size should come with “Cliffs Notes” (I thought they were Cliff notes, didn’t know Cliff himself had been taking notes all those years). Then I thought that could actually be kinda fun, to get a group of caring citizens in a room to analyze and synthesize the documents contents from multiple perspectives, and write it all down into a cheat sheet size version of the document so we can more easily discuss the more important side of the plan: the execution.

I think this might give us some ideas on things we can do as citizens to help give the city a head start on its own plans.

I’m not 100% sure what the format for dissecting the document would be just yet, but I’m thinking some mix of a mini Barcamp + Hackthon + something else entirely.

Anybody interested? RSVP and add ideas for how to keep this organized in the comments.

My goal is 90% compression – 20 pages of only the most critical information. Many skills and talents will be useful to accomplish this – designers, developers, writers, people experienced in various components of the city and city planning would also lend lots of great perspective to the process.

Just no jerks or whiners.

Lets check personal agendas at the door and just produce something that will get this important information into more peoples’ hands.

This could either be the best idea I’ve had in a while or the worst idea. Let’s find out together.

RSVP, see you Saturday. Looks like a bunch of people who want to attend can’t make it tomorrow, so I’m moving the event. New times/dates to be announced. You can still RSVP with interest and to get notifications of new working sessions! Thank you everyone for your interest!

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  • http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com alexknowshtml

    The State of Young Philly report has really good stuff in it, but the planning part in particular isn’t nearly as broadly researched as the city-prepared document.

    It’s also, by the definition of the name, drawn up for a very specific audience and about a very specific audience. I think there’s lessons to be learned from it and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some overlap in what we find in the city planning doc, but it’s important for citizens in Philadelphia to know what City Hall sees for the city – not just the citizens – to see where there’s overlap and mismatch.

    Since I doubt most people will sift through 200 pages and actually digest it, I think it’ll be extremely valuable to more than just us “young tech troublemakers” to have a more diversely representative document that’s already understood by the folks at City Hall at our fingertips.