Pictures and music are worth more than text, so here’s a deck (generic name for a Powerpoint) sponsored by Washington DC developers (Red Dove, website coming and Gragg & Associates) to crowdsource an urban destination for creatives in Washington DC.

Stay tuned for more info on the proposed development that’ll be the first to utilize the new crowdsourced placemaking tool Bubbly, and check out the preliminary vision here.

The music was custom produced by Yoko K, who does soundscapes for

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If you’re going to crowdsource places for creatives, it’s pretty clear you need to start with a core group of creatives. However, if you’re going to crowdsource the planning of urban districts for creatives, often sharing many of the same principles as the Smart Growth movement, it would be highly beneficial if everyone had a copy of the Smart Growth Manual as a reference.

Crowdsourcing a business or building is one thing, but planning urban development on a block or neighborhood level starts

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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 places aren’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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Sure, our instincts tell us diversity and crowds lead to a greater collective intelligence, as witnessed by the reliable ‘Ask the Audience’ option on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, but what about evidence?

That’s what Scott Page, professior of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics a the University of Michigan provides in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. An excerpt:

“For crowds to be wise, they must be able and

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The motivating factor behind writing entries for this blog is that I get to work directly with progressive creatives and developers to crowdsource these concepts into built reality.

So, considering the state of the economy, what are creatives’ solution in how the development of a building can become a symbol for economic growth? The following framework of a building will soon be crowdsourced in Washington DC as an answer:

- Local, independent businesses on the ground floor. Not only do local

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Providing retail for the emerging, growing, progressive creatives market doesn’t follow the same rules as provided by retail consultant Robert Gibbs in A primer on retail types and town centers. It’s a good guide for the general population, so let’s see what happens when we converge and remix it with the 19 urban development types for creatives.

First of all, for creatives, it’s no longer just retail, but retail entertainment. Second, retail no longer follows a simple ownership, product

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