In just two days, more than 10,000 people have watched Streetfilms' great Summer Streets video!

New York took an historic step this Saturday, opening up 7 miles of streets to pedestrians, cyclists, and a host of community uses. The car-free boulevard stretched from Central Park all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Streetfilms was there to capture the fun. Sounds like the video is a hit with the Livable Streets community:

• "We came into Manhattan via the F Train at Lex / 63rd and walked over to Park Ave. For the first time ever I was not worried about my kids running onto Park Avenue." - Eric
• "I signed up to volunteer at a summer streets event not really know what summer street was. It was the best time! i can't wait to experience the next 2 Saturdays. You will find me running, learning to bike and just dancing in the streets! Between the traffic and bike rental costs, I've never been motivated to learn but can't pass up free open road!" - Betty
• "The best news is that any and all cities can copy and follow NYC’s example, regardless of size and location. Portland did Sunday Parkways on June 22, in October Chicago, April 2009 Baltimore...Clarence's videos will help others get moving. It’s not rocket science...just do it!" - Gil Peñalosa (former Bogotá Commissioner of Parks, Sport, and Recreation).
  

 

This weekend's event was an amazing success, and we're looking forward to two more days of Summer Streets: this Saturday 8/16 and next Saturday 8/23.

Summer Streets is NYC's version of Ciclovia, a celebrated institution in Bogotá, Colombia. Every Sunday and holiday, Bogotá opens dozens of miles to roads to pedestrians, cyclists, runners, dancers, musicians, and everyone else. The event provides the physical space that makes for healthy, safe communities.

 

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The Summer Streets video adds to Streetfilms' cache of fun and inspiring vignettes that can be used for Livable Streets advocacy around the world. Streetfilms like Ciclovia: Bogotá, Colombia have already helped inspire cities like Baltimore build critical support that opens their streets to the public.

For more great snapshots, check out Streetsblog's Summer Streets Photo Tour. 

 

Photo courtesy of doddnyc/Flickr. 

The Web can be an incredible tool for advocacy. Streetsblog is an enormously successful example: a news outlet and community hub has transformed NYC's transportation landscape and tipped the scales toward livable streets and neighborhoods.

Today, we announce GothamSchools.org, a major foray into NYC's education scene.

"GothamSchools is a news source and online community for teachers, parents, policy makers, and journalists interested in learning about what works and what doesn’t in the nation’s largest school district. We seek to provide a clearinghouse for New York City school news and commentary, connect teachers and parents with resources, highlight effective practices in policy and pedagogy, and build a participatory knowledge base about education in New York City."

You can expect statistics crunching, up-to-the-minute reporting, and insights into the lives of teachers, students, parents, and principals. And best of all, you can have your say. It's a must-read for the coming school year.

The blog is is written by intrepid wordsmiths Philissa Cramer and Kelly Vaughan. Of the brand new site, Kelly says:

"We've appreciated the feedback of readers and friends (one blog-hating friend says we converted him!) who are responding to our posts and making suggestions about the site.  We're also working on a creative brief to guide the development of a visual identity and an expanded site."

Take a look!
 

Last night, we had the pleasure of hosting a Creative Commons Salon here at the TOPP office.

CC Salons are bi-monthly events that bring together fans of free culture and open source.  The format is 3 short presentations, followed by beer (sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery) and pizza -- a can't miss combination. Last night's presenters were the folks from Wikia Search, the hilarious comedian Max Silvestri (of Gabe + Max’s Internet Thing), and the Livable Streets crew from TOPP.

If you haven't tried it yet, Wikia Search is a new community-driven search engine that adds the "human touch" back into search.  Wikia was founded in 2004 by Jimbo Wales, the creator of Wikipedia (who was in attendance last night -- what a thrill!).  Not only do they intend to improve the quality of search results through the power of their users, the entire project is open source, including the indexes of the internet that they constantly crawl.  I must say, it's a pretty cool idea, and I've already set it as my default Firefox search helper.

Max Silvestri is a piece of work -- a comedian who, according to his website is "great at a bunch of stuff, but especially eating," he gave a gripping monologue about the social pitfalls of Facebook and confessed that he stays up late remixing other people's videos.

Lastly, we gave a short talk about the Livable Streets Network and how we've used Creative Commons licensing for our content, specifically for Streetfilms. By empowering viewers everywhere to freely copy and share videos like Ciclovia, permissive licensing makes it easier to convince your local officials to support Livable Streets projects.

We've been using Creative Commons licenses all along, but we haven't really established a coherent strategy for licensing all our various types of content.  Lucky for us, Fred Benenson from CC (who organized last night's event) came back today and helped us think through our options.  Thanks Fred!  Keep an eye out for more CC badges popping up across the TOPPosphere.

Update: Fred from CC blogged the event on the CC blog, and posted a photoset from the event.

The Livable Streets team was in Portland this week for the CarFree Cities Conference. Bike Portland has a great post about our presentation. We collected lots of great feedback on the new tools and new look, and LivableStreets.com will see some small (but important changes) based on thoughts gathered from our users.

After months of hard work by the outstanding tech team here at The Open Planning Project, we're proud to launch the Livable Streets Network, including fully redesigned versions of Streetsblog and Streetfilms. Here's a quick tour:

The first thing you may want to do is sign up and become a member to take advantage of all the features of the Livable Streets Network. The log-in box is there in the upper right corner.

Contribute an article to StreetsWiki and help us build a comprehensive, community-created, online encyclopedia on sustainable transportation, urban planning, smart growth and the issues important to Livable Streets activists around the world.

Interested in starting up a Livable Streets project in your own neighborhood? Create a group and use our online tools to get organized, connect with other activists and find the resources you need. Or join an existing group and get involved with a project that's already underway, like the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance in Manhattan.

 

Contribute photos, videos and notable web links to Streetsblog and Streetfilms and check out other people's contributions as well.

Meet other members of the network and add to our growing list of Livable Streets blogs in cities around the world.

And, of course, please let us know if you find any bugs, glitches or typos. If you find something that doesn't seem to be working as it should, send a report to tips@streetsblog.org or leave a note here in the comments section. We really appreciate your help in this.

So, go now and transform your city. We'll be drinking cocktails on the deck for the rest of the day. See you tomorrow.

We recently unveiled OpenGeo.org, the online home for the OpenGeo team.

Back in 2001, OpenGeo was just a twinkle in our eye. When they started GeoServer, Mark Gorton, Chris Holmes, and their collaborators saw the huge potential for open source, collaborative technologies to help transportation-planning bodies make better decisions.

We realized early on that in order to do complicated transportation modeling right, first you need to know ‘where the roads are.’ This discrete technical problem shed light on a huge opportunity: every municipality in the world needs to manage and share location-based information, whether it’s with colleagues, parallel agencies, or private citizens. But the technology tools to meet this basic need were inadequate.

Sharing location-based information – whether road data, crime statistics, or water quality readings – was expensive and cumbersome, partly due to proprietary tools that relied on closed formats.

GeoServer is a simple concept: share maps and their underlying information. Make it easy to share location-based data via maps on the web, and more groups will share more data. How? Follow open standards, support a huge variety of formats, play well with other technologies, and you lower the barriers to sharing and using data.

GeoServer has really taken off, and along the way, bolstering a larger community of production for open geo-based technologies. TOPP has become a leader in the field, ontributing to related open source tools (including OpenLayers and GeoWebCache) and doing consulting work for clients like Google, Landgate, and Portland TriMet.

And now the team that builds GeoServer and related products has a new home. Take a look!