stormbrew

Last week we took in the Canada Day fireworks here in Edmonton. I’ll get right to the point and say that they were incredibly awesome. I’m pretty sure that they were, in fact, the best fireworks I have ever been personal witness to. Well choreographed, lots of variety, some really massive explosions (the kind that make your eardrums uncomfortable), and all ’round a really good time.

It felt good to be an Edmontonian. I’ve always felt the fireworks in this city are lackluster, and it was nice to see such a blatant example of an improvement in effort in this city. Say what you will of the broken window theory, but sometimes the small things are signs of big things changing.

As someone who has sometimes been depressed enough by the winters in this city to seriously contemplate running off to San Francisco, things like this are why I stay. The possibility of being part of something mediocre blossoming into something awesome is a huge draw for me. Even if this is a bit of a backhanded compliment, this potential is what I love about Edmonton.

Which brings us to the perennial debate about the Airport. I’m young enough that I don’t remember a time when Edmonton had a functional, consumer oriented city center airport, so there’s little nostalgia in it for me. I’m also young enough that I have only vague memories of downtown edmonton being home to a massive railyard, as well. I do have memories of being in my family’s car as we drove through the rat hole under what is now Grant MacEwan’s downtown campus, though.

I wonder, sometimes, during this debate: was there an anti side to that railyard being shut down and converted into land for Grant MacEwan and the Railtown developments? Granted I don’t think it was as large a parcel of land as the airport is by any stretch, but surely having a rail terminal in our core could also have been argued to have been important to business interests. Surely a lot of businesses had to move or shut down to accommodate the shift. A warehouse in what is now part of the downtown core, after all, would have become completely useless after it was shut down.

But it was done because it was, presumably, in the best interests of our city and its core. Railtown as a development may have its problems, but I’m still glad it’s there instead of a railyard and a track over Jasper. The railyard was shut down in the early 90s and took, really, until the early-mid 2000s to become what it is now, which echoes the fact that development of the ECCA will take time to be fully realized and that no one is or should be expecting it to turn around into something amazing tomorrow.

My biggest concern, here, is what will Edmonton be in 20 years? Or 30 or 40. The people in favour of keeping the airport open tell us it will be too difficult and take too long to close down, clean up, and develop that land. Well, in 20 years, will it take us any less time? Will we still be hoping and dreaming for our downtown to be free of a cumbersome limitation 20 or 30 or 40 years after that? I, for one, am not patient enough to reopen this debate in 20 years, when I’m 50, in the hopes that this city will be something when I’m 80.

In 20 years, if our downtown does not need buildings that exceed 150m in height (to put that in perspective, the Calgary Tower — which looks stunted and puny against Calgary’s growing skyline — is 200m) or for our downtown to grow into the areas with the most restricted heights (directly south of the airport, where Jasper 111 is the highest building), we will have, in my opinion, failed as a city to achieve our potential.

For us to achieve that potential, we *require* more density. To put this in purely monetary terms, a denser downtown means more tax dollars. For example, every person in my condo building pays property taxes, and per square foot of land footprint my building is almost certainly paying far more in tax dollars than any house. We dense city folk pay more in taxes overall and help fund all the services cities need, including, for example, public transit.

And this city suffers from a crisis of public transit. Our lack of density means we have to run buses farther out, on more routes that cover more streets, with fewer tax dollars per kilometer of bus route. We will always have suburbs, but they must be balanced by higher density in the core or we will all wind up paying higher taxes for poorer services.

Not only that, but for developers taller buildings are almost certainly far more cost effective. The costs of building amortize better after selling/renting with a taller and larger building. I’m not a developer, myself, but this is my understanding. And it is very likely that these limits are preventing developers from bothering with our city due to cost effectiveness.

And this is why our city must build up and not out. This is why the airport is an unacceptable burden on our city’s ability to grow and thrive. I love the idea of general aviation. I want to someday learn to fly myself, when I feel more able to afford it. But the current situation cannot stand. The 150m cap must be lifted sooner rather than later. The opportunity costs are just too high.

I don’t think anyone can say with certainty that either decision is absolutely, unequivocally, the better choice for everyone. And both sides of the debate seem to agree that there must be a decision on this and not just another deferral. The problem is, the only decision that can possibly be made, irrevocably, is to close the airport. Leaving it open will always be a deferral. And if we wait until we’re forced into this decision by immediate and pressing concerns, it will be too late. The developers, the jobs, and the people will go elsewhere.

@ink_slinger linked to a City of Edmonton website today called “Idea Zone”. I was intrigued, so tried to find out what it was.

Go ahead, visit the site. See if you can find out what it’s all about. I can wait…

Did you visit it? What did you learn? Probably nothing, because in order to find out what this site is, you have to register. I don’t know about you, but I like to know what a website is before giving it my vitals. And its registration form is quite detailed. Although the more intimate fields (address and phone number) are not required, they are still asked for, which is quite intimidating.

So step one in how not to crowdsource is: Require me to register to find out what your site is.
And while we’re at it, step two is: Ask me for this much detail without buying me dinner first.

Thankfully, Edmonton blogstar Mack Male has a blog post that explains it all. Not a terrible idea, overall. I think they should have taken a bit more of a lesson from the low signups at the ICLEI Congress that there must have been something terribly wrong, but that’s a whole other matter.

The purpose of the site (for people who don’t want to click) is to get ideas for how to make Edmonton a better city. I sometimes think too much effort is put into finding ways to make this city better, and far too little into actually doing anything about it, but more input from a broader spectrum probably isn’t a bad thing.

So I register. Leaving out the gory details of my location, age, and phone number as I see no reason for them to have them. They do one thing right here and skip the activation step, so kudos on that. They miss the boat on the benefit of that step being skipped by not just having me logged in immediately.

So rule 3: Make me activate my account with a link in an email. Then make me log in even though I just gave you my username and password and so can’t possibly be faking who I am.

So I log in. Before I can do anything, I have to agree to this obscure set of rules about how my submission may or may not be used. I don’t really care. By now, I have gone through several forms, been frustrated and limited in what I can do at every turn, and am not really interested in submitting anything at all.

So a final rule before I sum up: Make me agree to rules I don’t care about even though this could have been a simple checkbox in the signup page.

But I go on, because now I’m on a roll and writing a blog post about it. Somehow I just can’t stop myself. I find that, since Mack’s post, there have been 10 new users and *no* new ideas posted. This comes as absolutely no surprise to me. I’m also too tired of signing up to enter an idea now.

I guess the city is using this software because they’re using a version of it internally with a stronger workflow. This is the public-facing version of that software. Well, I’m just going to come out and say it. The public facing side of it is crap.

When you’re crowdsourcing, your goal should absolutely not be to try to filter users out early. This is a super important thing for most sites to do because they’re looking to filter out all of the rough at the expense of some diamonds. Unfortunately, in crowdsourcing, you can’t afford to do this. The entire purpose of this process is for *you* to find the diamonds. That means a bit more work on your part, but it also means a less frustrating user experience.

Not only should users be able to see what the hell this site is without logging in, they should be able to see submitted ideas and even submit their own ideas with either a minimal (username/password) account creation or no account creation at all. It should be moderated, filtered on the level of word-triggers (no one will suggest to improve the city with anything to do with penis’ for example), but it should be *easy* to submit ideas.

Championing those ideas, commenting on ideas, there you can increase the barriers. But if your goal is to find new ideas, you must make this process much easier. It’s important to realize that internal and external tools rarely work well from the same package (see for example the dreadful WebCT — great for teachers, terrible for students).

To sum up all the rules in one sentence: Make it hard for users to submit ideas!