Why did I write this? It was during August 2003 that I found myself involved quite heavily in a debate about something that shouldn't have been a matter of debate at all. The Pune authorities wanted to break up a mountain so that they could shove a road through it. To me, it seemed like a no-brainer. Of course you can't take away one of the last remaining green spaces in Pune and replace it with tar and concrete and Ford Endeavours. To my horror though, there were enough people, educated people, well-meaning people, to whom that fifteen minutes saved on their commute was more precious. I found myself engaged in endless debates about this issue, and so to educate myself more, I started doing some research. This is when I stumbled upon Enrique Peñalosa, the incredible Mayor of Bogota. What he has to say is much better said by him. Suffice to say that his ideas brought tears to my eyes, for example
One common measure of how clean a mountain stream is is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.
or
If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time. Given our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success, and that could be in terms of happiness. It may be in how much time children spend with their grandparents, or the ways in which we are able to enjoy our friendships, or how many times people smile during the week. A city is successful not when it’s rich but when its people are happy. Public space is one way to lead us to a society that is not only more equal but also much happier.
Here are some links definitely worth following.
The Politics of Happiness
Bogota-A City Transformed
A Tale of Two Mayors:The improbable story of how Bogota, Colombia, became somewhere you might actually want to live
Academic Turns City Into A Social Experiment
Yes, I recognise it for the childish idealism that it is...:-) but I figure if it can be done in Bogota, it sure can happen anywhere.
Wouldn't you like to be able to ride a bike in your hometown if you wanted to?
7 comments:
chk out this site
http://go.ogleearth.com/
h
u have a deal :)
hi pa Tang,
Your comment on my post was really very quick !
Ruby on Rails - Rails is an MVC kind of framework based on Ruby ( an OO scripting language) , it promises to reduce the development time by ten times and has support for AJax. I came across it only a few weeks ago, have'nt spent much time studying it, so dont know it in detail :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_rails
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html?page=1
http://www.rubyonrails.org/
David Heinemeier Hansson was the originator and he won google OS hacker award recently for this. He has a company called 37signals which has very good products called basecamphq, tada-lists. I use basecamphq and I like it a lot.
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000489.html
Ajax on Rails
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/09/rails_ajax.html
My first initial thoughts on real world connection was to eliminate people who can cause trouble , normally in any web based system( ex ebay buyers or sellers) people can create multiple identities(false positives or negatives) for themselves and they can't be verified with the real world.
If we make a cellphone number as the way of verification (like an email id is used typically in many web applications) then trouble makers will have less incentive to do any trouble as they would know that they can be traced if they cause problem. A cellphone is always tied to valid address( which every phone company has to maintain as per TRAI regulation and all of the phone companies do that ). Thus any identity or user created in the system is trackable to some real world address.
Have to add an extra field in the registration form which will contain a mandatory text for mobile phone no and the user would click on Submit, he would recieve on his phone an SMS code
which has to enter into the subsequent page to complete the registration.
Your thoughts are using ryze/orkut is very good , as they leverage existing data and thus the
application can get upto speed very quickly.
I have some apprehensions on orkut/ryze , infact I recently deleted my orkut account(http://thiyagarajan.blogspot.com/2005/08/pop-goes-my-orkut-account.html).
Carpooling is the case of building a community around a specific action/goal, and orkut/ryze is more of a community which is for aggregating a community based on preferences. Ofcourse trust can
be derived through social connections/links there but what would be more effective is if we can aggregate information/community tailored around the action/goal itself.
What I was having in mind is something like this(http://consumating.com/) which would call for churing some bit of code but I think it would be very good.
Consumating where people ( who look out for daiting ) have their profiles tagged & ranked.
So here if the routes that are offered , the people who offer lift are tagged and ranked that would help other coordinate their decisions well. Well it's just a thought.
I think a bangalore version should do good, I had been thinking of doing something simillar for bangalore ever since I came here last year, discussed with a friend and the idea got shot down saying it is not cool :)[ though I had not thought of using the map then ]. A problem with implemening in bangalore could that it does not have extensive maps like the way mumbai has.We will have to investigae more on that.
Its been quite some time that I wrote web apps and I certainly haven't written any AJAX kinda app . So I am not an expert coder as you think :)[ These days I write code for applications running on smartphones ]
But this would be a very good reason to learn AJAX and write some worthwhile application. I will kinda busy till about the last week of this month after that I should quite some free cycles
to do serious contribution.
Btw I came across your other group blog http://desimediabitch.blogspot.com/, (it is very interesting ) . Your your other co-bloggers posts were also very good. Two that grabbed my attention particulary were
Nirvana ( Contributor - http://karmicnirvana.blogspot.com) - This word always grabs my attention as I am a big time grunger and Kurt Cobain is my most favourite vocalist/guitarist. The author posts very thought provoking too.
Fadereu ( A commenter - http://www.blogger.com/profile/3278325) - I was very impressed that he very aptly was referring to yochai benkler's paper on Sharing Nicely.
We can discuss things on email, you can reach me at mt_rajan AT yahoo DOT com
hi,
how is the testing of the carpool coming up.
Rajan
The link does not seem to be working. Do I need to have Google earth installed in my machine?
Hi, yes the server is down. I was going to fix it but then I figured the whole thing needed a rewrite anyway, which is what I've been busting my nuts on of late. The good news though is that I'm almost done and the new version is pretty darned cool (even if I say so myself). I hope to release it along with the source code sometime this week. The thing is ready on my home server but moving to patang.org is turning out to be a bigger pain than I anticipated. At any rate, rest assured that you will hear about it here first.
Thanks for your continued interest and support.
cheers
Anannya, you don't need google earth. There's a new developer/tester version out. If you're happy to kick it around, I can set up a login for you. Let me know.
I just read today's paper and they were saying they are going to try carpooling with sms in andheri - sounds like a reall cool proposition?
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