Placeways’ own Doug Walker will be leading a planning workshop in Honolulu at the 2009 HCPO/HIGICC conference on September 23, 2009. This annual conference brings together planners and GIS professionals.  This year the focus is on environmental, economic, and social components of community resiliency, with particular focus on island issues such as climate change, sea level rise and coastal hazards.

If you’re in Hawaii, please join us!  If you’re not in Hawaii, here’s your chance for a business trip…?

The website you are on is new!

We have a fresh new look, lots of multimedia, and clearer organization, all designed to make it easier for you to find what you need.

One of the wonderful things about technology is that it keeps getting better.  Internet connections are generally faster these days, which means we can offer more high-bandwidth media like videos and slideshows and expect that most people will be able to view them.  Computer monitors are better, too, so we can present a wider screen and use millions of colors.  And handy software utilities like Flash players and Javascript platforms are more ubiquitous, so we can offer nicer visual effects and more sophisticated security and account management.

You might particularly notice the abundance of new content in the CommunityViz sections of this site.  When it comes to CommunityViz there has always been a lot to talk about, and now we have better ways to share it.  We’ve added dozens of new multimedia pieces including new videos and case studies, informational slide shows, and more sample outputs.  We’ve also reorganized a lot of the product information so that it’s easier to find.

What’s going on with our e-mail addresses, you ask?  We’ve started listing contact e-mails in a slightly strange format, like info \at\ placeways \d0t\ com, on purpose.  That’s in response to one of the not-so-wonderful advancements in technology:  spamming systems.  The idea is that humans can figure out what those e-mail addresses mean quite easily, but computers can’t.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but we hope it’s good for all of us in the end.

How do you like it?  We are welcoming suggestions, bug reports, and, of course, compliments — just send your feedback to that strange e-mail address in the previous paragraph.

This is one of my favorite photos of the past couple of months.  It might take a few moments to digest, but as you look you’ll see it captures an iconic CommunityViz moment.

Take it as a mini mystery.  What’s going on here?

That’s CommunityViz on the monitor in the center, of course, and a woman pointing at it with a pen, clearly emphasizing a point.   There’s a sign that says above the monitor that says, “Table 2,” and as you look around you realize the monitor is in the center of a table full of people, all studying intently.  There are water bottles and papers full of notes:  it’s a roll-up-your sleeves work session.  Everyone has a nametag:  these are people who didn’t know each other before, but they’ve clearly come together for this occasion.  And then, in the background, you realize there is a giant room full of tables just like this one:  at least 4, maybe another dozen groups like this, all working around their CommunityViz analysis, talking together, using data, building understanding.  This is the famous “informed, collaborative decision-making” of the traditional CommunityViz tagline.  This is people making decisions about the future of their community, better than they could before.

And now the real story behind the mystery.  This photo comes to us from Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) and their MetroFuture project.  MetroFuture is a remarkably large-scale project that is creating a vision for 164 cities in towns in the Boston region; over 4-1/2 million people.  The people in this photo are just some of more than 500 who participated in a CommunityViz-supported public process.  Read more about it at www.metrofuture.org.

“What’s the learning curve?”

That is one of the hardest-to-answer questions we get from prospective and new CommunityViz users.

It’s on my mind because we’re preparing for our next public training session in a couple of weeks.  “Public” trainings are for anyone, and the format we use, at least, pretty well covers the CommunityViz waterfront in 3 intense days.  On the other hand, we have literally watched as some completely new users worked their way through the tutorials (which come with the package) in about 3 hours, all on their own.  We’ve started offering interactive web-training in increments as short as 4 hours, and our on-line demos only take about 5 minutes each!  So from all this we can definitively state that the learning curve is… how long?

Experience shows (no surprise) that you don’t really learn CommunityViz until you use it yourself, on a project, at least once or twice.  Software tools (and maybe golf, and driving a car) are like that:  practice makes perfect.  But not really “perfect,” because a.) there is so much to know, and b.) the target keeps moving, because the software keeps evolving.   I know a person with a Ph.D. and 20 years of experience in ESRI GIS who says that about Year 15 he finally gave up on ever “knowing it all.”  CommunityViz isn’t nearly as encyclopedic as ArcGIS, but the same idea holds:  there is probably more there than most of us mere mortals will ever know.

But that doesn’t stop anyone (or at least it shouldn’t).  As we’ve built out CommunityViz functionality, we’ve done more and more to present features in layers of successive sophistication and complexity.  You can do a basic land use plan now with a handful of clicks, and then you can go deeper and deeper from there until you’re writing complex models and calling custom Python scripts from inside CommunityViz formulas.   At some point, not too far into your acclimatization, you probably reach a point where finding features and mastering their individual use comes quite naturally.  The interface is reasonably well designed; it’s not that hard to find your way around.

The deeper art of CommunityViz is not finding features and figuring out wizards.  It’s connecting all that capability to real-world projects.  It’s thinking about what decision-makers need to consider or need to know, and then using CommunityViz to show it to them.  It’s finding the perfect balance of rigor and speed to reach that magic state that we call “enough, good information.”  All that is beyond anything we can teach in a 3-day class (though we give is a start!), and so far there is no known learning curve for art.

Some of the Placeways team.

Descriptions of Placeways usually start with a history lesson, but I (Doug, in the upper left) would rather start with the present.

Placeways is a growing group of smart, dedicated people who are working together on mission to put better tools into the hands of people who are making geographic decisions.  In the case of our flagship product, CommunityViz, those decisions are about the future of communities.  In the case of our consulting work and our other software tools, those decisions are varied and wide, but always important and always focused on something to do with geography and place.

We are organized as a company:  a “limited liability corporation” (LLC) that gives us lots of flexibility to pursue our mission and get work done.  We rarely work alone, though:  we partner with non-profits, with academic institutions, and with other commercial companies to do projects and research and to make software tools.  Our closest partner is the Orton Family Foundation, inventors of both CommunityViz and “Heart & Soul Community Planning,” and our teammates in the CommunityViz program.  We’re also delighted to be at the center of an informal network of CommunityViz consultants, trainers, educators, researchers, and of course users who are applying and advancing this technology all over the world.

With guidance from Orton, we do most of the design, development, and production of CommunityViz.  When you buy it, it comes from us (sometimes via resellers or partners); when you get technical support it comes from us.  We also have a professional services practice that provides CommunityViz expertise and implementation for projects, so we are heavy CommunityViz users as well.  Time and time again we find advantages in having both “sides of the house”—development and application—in one place so we can advise each other on what’s possible, what’s needed, and where to go next.

So finally, the history:  we started in 2005 when a small group of CommunityViz people spun off from the Orton Family Foundation in an amicable restructuring.   We’ve been growing steadily ever since, building the CommunityViz program and branching out into new areas as the company grows.

Placeways is pleased to announce the arrival of the newest version of CommunityViz:  4.0.

I’ll admit that sounds a bit like a birth announcement, but in a way it is.  And we, the sort-of parents, are just about as proud and happy as anyone who’s welcoming a shiny new member of the family.

Some highlights:

• Scenario 3D is an all-new 3D tool that takes advantage of all the latest and best 3D technology
• Custom Impacts Wizard lets you set up your own specialized analyses in just a few clicks
• Build-Out Wizard has been completely redesigned for ease of use and navigation
• Downloadable install package saves you all that time you’ve been spending waiting for your postal carrier (!).

Read a slightly longer summary here, or the entire description here.

One thing you won’t see on the outside is that Version 4.0 has changed a lot on the inside, too.  We’ve migrated most segments of the code from the older VB.NET platform to nice, new C#, which will make it faster, more robust, and easier to upgrade over time.

People often ask me how versions get their names:  how come this one gets a whole new first number (4), while others are only “dot” releases (as 3.3, pronounced “3-dot-3” was)?

This is a deep and complicated question that has been historically swathed in shadow, but now, for the first time I ever, I will tell you.  The answer is, Marketing.   Speaking as an engineer I know there really should be some science to it, some carefully constructed set of rules or thresholds or something that qualify a particular release as a dot or a whole.  And maybe at some point in history, or in some other products, there was or is.  But over time in CommunityViz Land, any engineering-oriented naming niceties have been lost, and now it’s just a matter of art.  The artist’s (a.k.a. product manager’s) challenge is to convey the right meaning with the name.  Sure, it would be fun to call this Version 9 Billion, but that might be, shall we say, an exaggeration.  On the other hand, if we just called this 3.4 you, the public, might not realize that it has major changes from 3.3, like the introduction of Scenario 3D.  So in general a release gets a whole number if it’s significantly or structurally upgraded, a dot number if it has the same structure as before, and a dot-dot number if it has to do with maintenance, platform compatibility, or other changes that won’t affect most people’s user experience.  Or so.  As I said, it’s an art!

Anyway, we hope you enjoy the “significant” new features and “structural” upgrades in Version 4.0, the newest addition to the CommunityViz family.