Over the last few years, in meetings and such I always introduce myself by saying ‘I look after the PAS website’. But after reading this excellent missive from Paul Ford I’ve decided that from now on I’m ‘Editor in Chief’ at PAS. Happy to plead guilty to possessing:
“…the willingness to schedule the living sh*t out of everything, the ability to see patterns, a total dedication to shipping, and willingness to say “no”…”
A quick post to let you know about two new bits that went live on the PAS website today.
You can stare at page impression and visitor data until you are blue in the face and you still won’t know whether a new addition to the website is any good. And for qualitative data the annual website survey never rolls around fast enough for a timely reponse.
With that in mind we’ve taken on some work being done by LG Improvement and Development and implemented a new voting pod. It asks for a yes or no to the question “Was this page helpful?” It also has space for you to offer some comment.
Take a look and remember: vote early and vote often.
Whilst piggy-backing on other people’s projects is all good fun, sometimes it doesn’t work. Our events form was a bloated mess of multiple pages and purchase order numbers that didn’t suit our free events. Looking at our stats showed alarming rates of attrition between the various pages, too.
We’ve now replaced it with a single, simple page that has only the information we need. Hopefully that makes things less of a hassle for people when our next series of events comes around.
Jane Jacobs, ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’:
Neighbourhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, “neighbourhood” is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.
I’m only a third of the way through this book, but can’t help thinking there is already a lot in there to be learnt about what planning can (and shouldn’t) do in the world of localism, localism, localism.
This is a guest post by John Dixon (Plymouth Borough Council) as part of our series on ‘Blueprints for ‘open source’ planning’
What does the future hold for the planning system and should we be worried? I want to concentrate on the central plank of the Coalitions policy: Localism.
So what is Localism? There are a few clues in the documentation put out so far: its …”giving neighbourhoods far more ability to determine the shape of the places in which their inhabitants live…enabling communities to formulate a positive vision of their future sustainable development.” And what does this mean for planning? Continue reading
This is a guest post by Brian Curran as part of our series on ‘Blueprints for ‘open source’ planning’
Looking back, it feels like it wasn’t long before we all realized that a prerequisite for localism was strong nationalism. ‘Open source’ planning was doomed if everyone stubbornly invented their own method – we needed a standard 80% and a local 20%. ‘Open source’ became a language to describe how the boilerplate national approach was implemented locally. It was the straightforwardness of the national framework that provides clarity even when, as sometimes happens, a community chose to define itself in opposition to what is generally accepted to be our national best interest.
Part of the problem we began with was the shoddy law. Scattered across statutes and case law, it was an unwieldy tool for specialists, let alone normal people. When we had a lightweight and cheaply updated policy (the purpose) and regulations (the rules) it was a revelation. A strong practitioner review and the fact that they are updated and issued as complete documents means that legal challenge and friction costs have reduced drastically. Continue reading
This is a guest post by Councillor Claire Denman (Crawley Borough Council) as part of our series on ‘Blueprints for ‘open source’ planning’
Last night I chaired my first LDF working group meeting since the elections. Our agenda had been prepared a month in advance to ensure that we remained on schedule in accordance with our LDS. It was obsolete before the meeting even started. Should I cancel the meeting and allow our planning officers time to watch the world cup that night? Or should we carry on and see what we can do to progress our core strategy?
The underlying question that no one could answer at the meeting was; ‘what will planning look like in the next few years?’ Continue reading
I’m back at work after a few weeks away and in the thick of editing stuff in preparation for our email bulletin that goes out this week. It’s good to have a break and come back to this stuff with fresh eyes. The two docs I’ve gone through so far were chock of full of my favourite Excessive Capitalisation of Important Words.
Rather than just cursing my pedantry it occurred to me that the unnecessary capitalisation was a red flag for jargon. The capitalised words were all ones that planners either think is important or they have some kind of special meaning for them so they elevate it to proper noun status.
We’ve all got a responsibility to make our documents accessible and in plain English. I’ll accept it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. But next time you’re looking through one of your planning documents take a look at what you’ve given a capital letter to and ask yourself – is this word so special that the punter out there is going to understand what we mean?
This is a cartoon to illustrate a chapter from the 37signals book ‘Rework’ out next week. They’re talking about business planning rather than town planning, but could the essay (available as a sample chapter) be just as applicable to our vaunted sector?
“Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.
Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.”
It’s not rocket surgery
I spent last Tuesday holed up in the ICA with Steve Krug and 40 other folks for a workshop on website usability. Steve is a big friendly American who likes to see things get better and stuff get done. He’s come up with a simple way to get people to start doing their own web usability testing done cheaply and effectively and to get it done now.
Nice to see this: planning applications on a map across council boundaries.
This has been created by Adrian Short of Mash the State using the Planning Alerts API and yahoo pipes. Planning authorities across the land can now easily add this to their website and give citizens a nice picture of what is going on where. Bravo!
Nice backstory from Adrian on the IDeA’s Community of Practice platform. (Registration req’d).
Planning Advisory Service 