Content about Colorado

Innovative new city marketing techniques are being employed by local governments around the world to aide in the transformation of their city into a thriving center of tourism, culture and development. More and more municipalities see the need to capitalize on their community’s assets and create good public spaces in order to attract more investment, business, residents and visitors.

Several weeks ago, the office of Denver’s Mayor Michael Hancock launched a two-part community engagement strategy to gather public input on important financial issues facing the City of Denver.  A series of public forums put keypad polling devices in the hands of city employees and Denver residents to test the best   ideas for how to address the City’s financial challenges.  The Mayor also unveiled a new participatory budgeting tool encouraging public feedback on key topics relative to fixing Denver’s budget gap. The new interactive tool, Delivering Denver’s Future, gives residents a unique opportunity to weigh in on how to fix the city’s broken budget.

Open Government Initiative is a collaborative project which was established by a familiar group of passionate advocates of open government, including CityCamp, Colorado Smart Communities, Code for America, the Sunlight Foundation, OpenPlans, in late 2010. Guided by their commitment to transparency, participation and accessibility in government, the group has made significant progress in the movement to build the public’s trust and satisfaction by creating new opportunities for innovation. Recently, Open Government Initiative published their Candidate Open Government Pledge and Declaration of Open Government Principles, in an effort to make it easier for local governments to better implement open government policies. The sample templates, highlighted below, echo President Obama’s collective call for open government, in his address to the United Nations in September 2010. 

Inspired by Denver, Colorado’s downtown buildings and unique architecture, a group of school children, ages 8-11 years, from the local community came together this past summer to explore what it takes to build a real city. Metropolitan State College of Denver’s Art Department and the Denver Public School (DPS) district joined forces to offer students in the area a unique alternative to the typical sports and recreation type of summer camp through an new flagship art outreach program: Art Builds Communities (ABC).

Communities across the country are celebrating National Community Planning Month this October. The month long “event”, sponsored by the American Planning Association (APA), its members, chapters, divisions, and professional institute, was developed to recognize the vital role of planners and planning in communities throughout the U.S. At EngagingCities, we have been encouraged historically by the amount of participation we’ve seen with this celebration at a local level here in Colorado. We are excited to see what is in store for 2011’s celebrations around the nation.

CityCamp Colorado 2011 will bring together government professionals, private sector specialists, members of academia, the press, and other interested citizens with the goal of creating actionable plans and efforts to make our governments more accessible.

From the official website: CityCamp Colorado will bring together people like yourself to share ideas to improve local government. CityCamp is an unconference focused toward the participants sharing insights and experiences and taking action to bring about the significant, positive change our communities need. At an unconference, content is created and organized by participants.

We’ve been playing around with making maps from geotagged photos for the last couple of years. In terms of hardware, we’ve talked about how you can use the iPhone and iPhone apps to geo-tag photos and upload the photos to the web. As far as geo-tagging cameras go, there are a number of different brands of GPS-enabled cameras out there. The College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado recently purchased several  Panasonic Lumix cameras. I like this camera because:

We’re happy to report that Open Colorado just recently relaunched itself as a non-profit. Aligning with goals of promoting transparency and accessibility throughout governments in Colorado, the organization is currently seeking input from users on how to best shape it’s new open data website.

In his article “iPads for Planning” (posted on Planetizen, April 2, 2010), Robert Goodspeed states that the iPad and iPhone are excellent tools for planning because they are highly mobile, location aware, and can be connected to a 3G network.