Can Collaborative Computer Programming Produce Sustainable Software for Planners?

In recent years, government sponsored hack-a-thons have become a highly utilized form of software development for a diverse number of industries - the field of urban planning is no exception to this ‘peer production’ type of approach. These contests and challenges are popping up everywhere, with the purpose of bringing highly skilled developers together in a collaborative computer programming environment in which to build new interactive software applications.

One such example of this is the City of Portland, Oregon’s City Council Agenda App, designed to to encourage dialog between local City government and residents. While applications produced by government challenges such as these are some of the most innovative and creative online engagement tools available to city planners, unfortunately many are quickly abandoned. Why?

Seeing the development of new web tools through to fruition requires a hefty investment. With any software development, thorough customer analysis is needed to predict user behavior and create a desire and demand among community members to ensure utilization of the software. Analyzing demographics, motivation, and planner vs. citizen expectations are equally important in determining the appropriate target groups for these new apps. Market analysis results are important to help establish an optimal point between the trade-off of time-to-market and quality. While government and planning agencies would love to have a short time-to-market with lots of features and high quality, it is difficult for the developer to find financial success in this scenario. While participating developers typically do receive recognition for their efforts in the form of publicity and exposure, sadly most do not consider it worthwhile to spend the time and money required to turn their cool apps into sustainable products.

Open Source Alternative to Gov App Challenges
If a government's goal with a new software application outreach program like Oregon’s City Council Agenda App Challenge is simply to let the commercial world know that a data set is available, a competition may be just the thing to do to facilitate innovative development. However, agencies must realize that direct long-term applications may not emerge from these types of  collaborative software development exercises. Alternatively, if government and planning agencies intend to actually get the general public to use the apps that are developed through these contests, they will likely need to focus considerable resources on funding the full project, including the research and analysis and community outreach and education phases.

A New Approach
Portland's CivicApps is trying to a different approach than that of most governments with these challenges by requiring any winning app to be open sourced. They also require a winning developer to offer the app online for at least a year after the contest. This gives the app time to gain some traction, and ultimately gain broader financial support on the basis that an app that can be useful to one government may also be useful to many agencies.

Public Involvement = Awareness and Increased Use of Apps
Public acceptance is the other big problem. Take Portland PDX bus app for example. This app, which was developed during a city sponsored hack-a-thon challenge, tells the public how soon a bus is coming in order to minimize wait time. The information can be especially useful during cases of bad weather or traffic accidents; however, the app remains, for the most part, unknown and under-utilized.

One way to move past this problem is to increasing public involvement in government. For city planners today, public engagement is critical and there are a lot of advantages to collaborative software development in building an online space where residents feel empowered to get involved in the process. Creating awareness and consistent communication and training about the benefits to community members will facilitate increased use of such software.

Many potentially great apps came out of Portland’s recent hack-a-thon.
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[This article was inspired by the O’Reilly Radar]