When it comes to crowdsourcing, there’s not much compelling about the Give a Minute program that allows a city’s residents to send in their ideas to improve their community via website, Facebook, Twitter, or text, like an online suggestion box. However, when a city commits to actually implementing the most popular and feasible ideas, now you have something meaningful.

That’s what New York City is adding to the Give a Minute! program, which has run its course in Chicago and Memphis. NYC’s

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With the crowdsourcing of an entire downtown’s revitalization in Bristol, Connecticut, it’s important that each person’s face-to-face experience reflects their online experience, and vice versa.

For instance, in the face-to-face meetings, people individually mention the kinds of public amenities and retail destinations they’d like to see in the downtown. The next step involves identifying the most popular or repeated suggestions, like say, a piazza, a skating rink and a beer garden. The crowd

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While a restaurant concept initiated in 2007, now known as Elements, is still being crowdsourced into a community-oriented, vegetarian, locally-based third place, a team of creatives in Lansing, Michigan have taken it upon themselves to crowdsource a restaurant in 90 days. Now that’s a timeline fellow creatives can get enthused about.

The video below provides a window into the crowdsourcing process. Ideas to whet the crowd’s appetite are thrown out, as the image above shows, with one idea

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If you’re passionate about walking, biking and living outside of the city, then you might want to check out what may be the very first new car-free community to break ground in the U.S. Modeled after remote pedestrian-only towns like Zermatt, Switzerland (see photo above and aerial of town here), it’s called Bicycle City, and its founders would like the initial development 15 miles south of Columbia, South Carolina to be the first of many.

It will be very similar to the Vauban neighborhood in

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Now there’s a term you don’t hear very often, but you’re going to. Transparent real estate development. It’s a necessary first step towards open source development, which is when people not only get to see what’s going, but get to participate. This in turn is key for crowdsourced placemaking, when people determine what places they’re passionate about creating with others, and do so.

One of the most effective forms of transparency in real estate development is letting people know what’s going

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Crowdsourcing often gets negatively associated with competitive websites that utilize a crowd to submit ideas in order to select one winning entry, and less so with collaborative efforts like Linux and Wikipedia.

So, we present a little video to help explain that there’s a difference between competitive crowdsourcing, collaborative crowdsourcing, and purpose-driven collaborative crowdsourcing, especially when it comes to placemaking.

The video also communicates that crowdsourcing is not

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As part of the American Institute of Architect’s (AIA) Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) invited to East Bayside, Portland, Maine, here’s the section of the final report that explains how to establish a crowdsourced sustainability system, as summarized by this previously posted entry and video. Stay tuned for the AIA SDAT’s final report to be posted here. Why am I posting this? It may serve as a guide for other neighborhoods like East Bayside that want to attract investment, yet

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It may be easier to explain via diagram why the content of wildly successful services like Facebook, Google, eBay and Amazon are sourced by crowds, yet placemaking isn’t.

Based on economic models presented in crowdsourcing expert Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, the key to whether or not an entity will crowdsource is based on its management and management structure.

On the x-axis, all business models are represented, from the least

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Posted publicly on Facebook here, Keith Ammann’s question on how to go about crowdsourcing a creative cultural district in the small town of Freeport, Illinois, supported with detailed advantages and disadvantages, is followed by a suggested plan:

Summary of advantages: 3-4 block downtown with a mix of architectural styles; moderate vacancy rate; mixed-use zoning allowing for apartments over storefronts; established, locally owned businesses including two coffeehouses; a successful multiplex

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If you’re selected to speak at TED, it’s because you’re changing the world.  Katherine Fulton, President of the Monitor Institute, whose mission is to “help innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental problems,“, presented “You are the future of philanthropy”, but it could just as well have been titled, “You are the future of city building”.

This is a moment in history when the average person has more power that at any time. She further

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