I wrote for issues #37 — cover essay, “Joint Venture” (1996), #38 The Authentic Issue (1996), #41 The Magazine Issue (1997), and #46 – Fanzines and the Culture of DIY (1998). Some of that work is featured in this issue.

I’m also quoted on the inside front cover here:

I say that copyright is the mechanism by which underground people or independent people or people without resources can create a stable entity. There’s only so much land in this world, but you can wake up every single day and create brand new intellectual property. That’s beautiful. Dan O’Neil, Emigre #36, 1996.

Tolva and O’Neil will discuss city spaces as platforms that bring together all aspects of a built environment: physical, digital, social, and political. How do digital tools augment our understanding of the cities we live in and how can they make us more engaged teachers, students, and citizens? What are the larger implications of new technologies for our conception of how the built environment is actually experienced?

Presentation to the A+DEN ( Architecture+Design Education Network) conference in Chicago, November 6, 2009. More here on the A+DEN site.

Note: the lion’s share of this presentation (slides 1 – 69) are by John Tolva. This PDF does not do it justice. Here it is as a movie.

A good infographic is worth a thousand words. Data visualization can help bridge the gap between government projects and citizen engagement. Panelists will discuss opportunities to use data to better understand cities and guide regional policies.

Here’s some of the points we covered:

• It may seem like automatic data, but there are millions of humans behind it
• People reporting potholes, cops coming to the aid of citizens, building inspectors crawling through job sites
• Represents immense human labor and many citizen interactions
• Getting represented here is as important as being represented in the voting booth

Others have taken an interest in these truck decals, too. Not long ago I came across a web site and collection created by an author and software developer named Dan O’Neil, who is also fascinated with the “Wide Right Turn” signs and assembled a Flickr set and a web site.

O’Neil says he has “a primary and lasting” obsession with the signs. He appears to be interested in them for reasons similar to mine: their variety. Like me, he sees a wider pattern in these mundane messages. He loves “annotated compilations and manic compendiums,” which he says demonstrate “the role of variation in a capitalist society” and his compendium of signs is one of these.

The signs belong to the category of what O’Neil terms “Derivative Works.” They are part of an American “love affair with differentiation [that] extends to everything we choose—cars (big, small, real big, super big), houses (great room in front, great room in back, vinyl windows, center staircase), toothbrushes, credit cards, everything.”

In 2006, O’Neil received an email from a man who claims to have designed the first, or at least one of the first, signs. The man, Mark Bender, lives in Scotland, but was born in Texas. He believes he drafted the first wide-right-turn sign 30 years ago for a truck company in San Antonio now called R&L Carriers; the firm also planned to sell the signs to other companies. Bender said he was paid a fee of $500. He moved to Scotland, and more than fifteen years later, he returned to the United States to find his signs and many like them on highways everywhere.

More right-turn signs, using red X’s and starbursts.

In his email Bender told O’Neil about his background in drafting—he was the son of an architect and inherited his love of perspective, which may account for the exaggerated perspective of the sign. He is proud of adding an image to the words, Bender wrote: “At the time, the idea of putting an image that ‘showed you’ the problem was unheard of.”

The part of the design of which Bender was proudest is also the one I find most delightful: the little red graphic representing a crash. He calls it a “starburst.”

“My favorite bit is the crazy explosion bit where the car and the truck collide!” he noted. “I always loved the POW! and WAM! from Batman, the television show.” I knew from my time on the road just what Bender meant.

Bender’s claim sounds legitimate, but how many others could have been working similarly on signs, with slightly different design approaches? It would be easy to read the variety of signs as a parable of competition against government standardization in design—except that the winner would be clear. The effectiveness of the competing private creations is that they do get your attention without being pretty, elegant or “well designed.” They are charming and human. They are like signs an amateur like me would devise. But there is a small flash of creativity to each one of these, a little firecracker of an idea.

Call it the starburst effect.

www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/1653034,CST-EDT-edit06b….

July 6, 2009

Ever hear about the City of Chicago spending money on something and think to yourself, that’s just goofy?

Just the other day, Ald. Ed Burke griped about the city paying a contractor $915 every time it hauls a body to the morgue, while noting that other cities pay far less.

Most of us don’t have Burke’s soapbox. But now, in a more modest way, you too can let the world know when you think the city’s blowing your money.

In a clever use of technology to bring information to the masses, two civic-minded, tech-savvy guys — Daniel X. O’Neil and Harper Reed — have set up a Web site, citypayments.org, that offers a searchable database of thousands of city contracts for a variety of goods and services, from Chevy Impalas to toilet seats.

The City of Chicago offers much the same information on its Web site, but the database on the independent citypayments.org is easier for the average citizen to use.

And here’s the best part: Taxpayers can comment on the spending they find at citypayments.org and even flag an expenditure as "goofy."

You might wonder if this will accomplishment anything other than providing hours — or at least minutes — of entertainment.

Who knows? Maybe a business aced out of a city contract by a clout-heavy rival will anonymously drop a dime at the site. Maybe a city employee, frustrated by waste in her department, will point out a few interesting secret facts about a contract — again anonymously.

This could turn into a fine fishing ground for reporters and prosecutors.

At the very least, it offers an education on how Chicago spends our tax dollars.

The more folks who plunge into the site, the more interesting things might get.

Get snooping.

Take a look at CityPayments, a database of all vendors, contracts, and payments that have been posted by the municipal government of the City of Chicago to the Vendor, Contract, and Payment Search lookup tool maintained by the Department of Procurement Services.

Statement of Daniel X. O’Neil in support of the proposed City asset lease agreements disclosure ordinance.

Monday, June 1, 2009. 11:30 a.m., Council Chambers

My name is Dan O’Neil, and I am one of the co-founders of EveryBlock.com, a neighborhood news site serving 11 cities, including Chicago, where we are based.

I ask you to support this ordinance, which calls for the City Comptroller to publish “ City asset lease agreements and accounting information” in the general course of business.

My job at EveryBlock is to work with city governments to uncover new data and to make it available in the most useful formats as possible. I’ve worked with city leaders– department heads, council members, technology developers, policy makers, and so on, in each of the 11 cities we cover.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that there is a great desire on the part of municipal leaders to share data, but they often don’t realize that the information they see every day as a part of their work– exactly the types of documents that we’re talking about today– actually contain valuable data that allows citizens to understand what the city is doing for them. There is a wide and growing array of tools that allow civic-minded Web developers to make data more searchable and ultimately more valuable in deciding what we want to do collectively as a city.

The idea of a publishing a “single accounting document, updated quarterly, that details the appropriations, investments, interest income earned, and future budget year distributions of City asset lease agreements”, goes a long way toward this goal.

This is sound policy, and I urge you to make it law.

Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago: documenting my unsuccesful attempts to obtain pothole data from Chicago’s Department of Transportation

And the Chicago Sun-Times references specific, detailed pothole numbers:

“The city had a daily average of 300 to 400 potholes in the days before Christmas, but the number jumped to more than 1,100 Monday, city officials said.”

These quotes indicate that the city has relatively sophisticated technology for managing street defects. They are able to track the location of potholes from the data in their 311 system. With GPS on city trucks and in city worker cell phones, they can track equipment and personnel. As workers report back on filled potholes, the city has real-time data on the exact location of street defects.

Restaurant Inspections *and* Results of Hearings Should be Published Online: highlighting a fundamental unfairness in the selective publication of government data.

There was a ton of good stuff in this article about the current state of inspections across the country. One issue is that raw inspection reports are widely available all over the Web, but the results of hearings– which is where the restaurant owner has a chance to respond to any violations– are not. As you can imagine, that rubs restaurant owners the wrong way, as they indictment is always public, but their side of the story is not.

NY Attorney General Should Practice Transparency He Preaches: pointing out that Andrew Cuomo’s own office does not meet the standards he expects from others.

We published the available data for expired items found within the city limits, and I spent weeks attempting to get a complete list of the 500 pharmacies that the Attorney General claims he sent his investigators. His office has refused to fulfill our request.

Here in March 2009 United States of America, it seems to be the simplest political shibboleth to proclaim one’s support for transparency and accountability. But I’ve also noticed that actually living up to that is often less of a priority.

www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/1488786,CST-EDT-edit22b….

March 22, 2009

It was a modest proposal. Two aldermen, Manny Flores and Scott Waguespack, suggested shedding some light on the city’s TIF district deals by putting information on the Internet.

TIF stands for tax increment financing, but as we have explained before, this is what they really are: Mayor Daley’s private piggy bank.

TIF districts allow the mayor to use hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax money to pay for what he’d like done in the city, with little oversight.

When the City Council sets up a TIF district, it siphons all the property tax money that’s generated for the next 23 years from rising property values or new development into a TIF fund. That’s money that would normally go to schools, parks and other taxing bodies.

TIF money is supposed to foster redevelopment in neighborhoods, but, of course, there’s always a question of which developers get the money and under what terms.

The two aldermen wanted to put much of that information in one easy-to-find Web location for all to see.

At a Council committee hearing, Dan O’Neil, a representative of EveryBlock.com, which publishes nifty information such as local crimes and restaurant inspections, offered to help the city get the information out — for free.

The matter was put on hold.

For more study.

This from a City Council that can approve a $1.2 billion deal to lease the city’s parking meters after about an hour of debate.

The aldermen’s suggestion was nothing earth-shattering.

But the Council’s reaction speaks volumes about their cynical attitude toward open government.