International Open Data Day dawned bright and beautiful this year in Wellington.

And, instead of getting out into Wellington’s all-too-rare sunshine, a group of open data and environment enthusiasts gathered at the National Library’s beautiful net.work space to spend the day conceptualising, designing and prototyping environment-related products and services.

Check out the video below for more on the event. You can also read more — including about the 6 awesome projects — over on data.govt.nz’s blog.

Rapid prototyping with environmental datasets — International Open Data Day 2017 (data.govt.nz)

The event was organised and sponsored by data.govt.nz, Open Data NZ, Statistics NZ, National Library, LINZ and GovHack NZ.

GovHack NZ is NZ’s largest open data/open government hackathon, and happens across the country 28–30 July 2017. This year, Nick and I are leading it as part of the social good/volunteering component of our GovWorks NZ work.

International Open Data Day: Wellington was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In November 2016, Nick and I ran a service design workshop with Gisborne District Council, focused on introducing human-centred design principles into better supporting events in the region.

Here’s what we did.

— — —

Gisborne faces an interesting situation. It’s not on the way to anywhere, nor between anything. This means that people who visit this (stunning) part of the country are doing so specifically.

It also means Gisborne has to work harder to attract visitors.

Apart from the stunning scenery, events are a major way for Gisborne to celebrate itself and its residents, and also to bring in tourists.

They include major events like the annual Rhythm and Vines festival, as well as smaller community-run events and things like school galas.

The Council wants to do a better job of supporting events in its region, and the people who plan and attend them. So they contacted us and asked if we could come and run a learn-by-doing workshop with them, to:

• teach them some of the basics of service design and agile service development
• develop problem definitions, and
• prototype solutions.

Our 1-day workshop had both tangible and intangible aims

As mentioned above, the aim of the workshop was to identify potential service solutions for some of the existing problem areas the Council has around event management (both in- and externally).

We expected the workshop to result in some or all of the following:

• policy documents people could act on
• change suggestions supported by research, and plans of action
• service designs and/or initiatives
• (tech) platforms, and/or ways to use them
• things that hadn’t even occurred to anyone.

Less tangible but equally valuable results would include:

• experiencing different ideas and new work methods
• building real connections to people in the same team, other teams and in the community
• seeing how a structured innovation process can produce robust, concrete and human-centred results — even in just a day.

So many things, so few hours

Because we wanted this to be an initial crash course, and demonstrate both a range of different techniques but also how quick and powerful prototyping can be, we did a lot, in a very short time.

[Our participants were exhausted by the end of it, and in future we’ll have the data to back up our suggestion to clients that 2 half days is more productive, and much kinder, than one full day.]

The basic shape of the day used the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond process model. As a group, we:

• discussed definitions for “event”, and agreed that we’d include more than the large events, as many events might trigger Council requirements whether they know it or not, and wouldn’t necessarily know to apply to the Council for permissions
• split into groups to identify the range of events held in the region
• identified the common problems experienced by events and their organisers
• identified 3 core event types to focus on for the day: professionally-run events, community-run events and smaller events like school galas.

From here, we took people through:

• designing personas for event organisers and making an initial journey maps
• meeting as a single group to talk with a very senior event planner in the region, to learn from her frustrations and experience
• going through several iterative rounds of talking with event organisers, Council staff and other stakeholders to validate personas and journey maps, major pain points (ie problem definitions), and potential solutions.

Finally, we took all of the information and context that participants had gathered during the day, and:

• placed their validated prototype solutions into an organisational context, developing service outcomes, value statements and key performance indicators (ie “how do we know if we’re succeeding at this?”)
• reworked their journey maps for each of the new service initiatives, including outward-facing customer touchpoints and internal system and process touch points.

These final 2 pieces of work will form the basis of the inevitable business cases required by organisations like this to get new initiatives off the ground.

— — —

Fine, but what did you actually learn? What solutions did they test?

The team realised that:

• talking with “users” — both internal and external (eg event planners) — needn’t be scary, and is a brilliant way to figure out what’s not working, and how to improve it
• they didn’t really understand the timelines of event planners, and often had Council processes out of step with what event planners need to do, and when
• there are many kinds of event planners, and they all want early, clear communication about requirements
• event planners, general members of the public and Council staff all wanted to be able to look at which events where happening, when
• Council and those who interact with them often make assumptions about each other — sharing more information could mean big savings in time and costs
• event planners wanted a single source of contact with the Council — someone who could guide them through the necessary paperwork, liaise between them and all the Council departments necessary, and help them feel welcome and valued
• all isn’t broken — Gisborne District Council is doing lots well
• users (eg event planners) are happy to get involved and help improve matters, and it’s a great way to mend relationships, get people reengaged, and make sure services are relevant
• everyone’s keen on the same end goal — making sure people know how lovely Gisborne is, and enjoy their time there.

The team developed 3 possible solution themes. They went back out to test them with people, and used that feedback to hone them.

From there, we helped them build the frameworks they’d need to build business cases around the solutions, and sent them home, exhausted but also energised.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. We fed them back a number of suggestions for where to go next and, of course, are in touch with them to see how things go.

We’re as excited as they are :)

— — —

If you’d like to see the full report we wrote for the Gisborne District Council, please get in touch with us.

Interested in chatting with us about how we can help your organisation work on real solutions to real problems? Get in touch!

Service design for Councils: Better Gisborne events was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Your elected members are there to represent your interests. But to do that, they need to show up at meetings.

Let me start with a full disclosure. From February 2009 until May 2014 I was a staff member at Whangarei District Council. As the person responsible for preparing the town plan for the district, I needed to attend a lot of council meetings.

These meetings are important, because this is the opportunity for elected councillors to provide direction to staff. They are also the forum in which all decisions are made, based on the information they are presented with. This decision-making authority is what you — the voters — have given your elected members.

Councillors make decisions that affect you, and they do this on your behalf. This vested responsibility is of course significant, and should not be taken lightly. And I have experienced first hand how this decision-making process works. Like any group of humans, the personalities, dynamics and balance of power ebbs and flows depends on the composition of the group.

I have seen projects succeed or fail because one particular councillor was absent.

Things I started noticing

Some councillors always seem to be there. Full council meetings, committee meetings, workshops, and even sub-committees that they aren’t a part of, but go to out of interest. They are usually the ones who seem to have a really thorough grasp of what is going on.

Then there are the other ones. The ones that always seem to turn up 2 minutes into the meeting, or disappear at tea time and miss the last session of the morning. I thought I started to notice a pattern, but wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because I got annoyed by people interrupting proceedings by turning up late, so I tended to notice that more than absenteeism. I decided to find out.

A matter of public record

The Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 requires council meeting agendas and minutes to be made publicly available. Most councils like Whangarei District Council publish their meeting agendas and minutes on their website. I decided to look through all the committee minutes for the current election term (since 30 October 2013).

Each council will generally have “Full Council” and “Extra-Ordinary Council” meetings that all elected councillors are members of. These are the meetings where delegations are issued, budgets are allocated, and policies are decided. Then there are council committees, which are typically tasked with “portfolios” of issues to deal with, such as finance, infrastructure, planning or community services.

In the Whangarei District, every councillor is a member of the Infrastructure Committee, Planning Committee, and Finance Committee. Subcommittees comprised of only some councillors are/have been the 20/20 Inner City Revitalisation Committee, Audit and Risk Committee, Community Funding Subcommittee, and Exemptions and Objections Committee.

So, how have our councillors been performing in terms of meeting attendance?

My methodology

I went through the minutes of every committee and subcommittee meeting and collected data on councillors’ attendance. Where minutes recorded an apology, I marked down a count of zero for that councillor. Councillors that were absent without an apology I also recorded as zero. I was tempted to dock a point for being truant, but I am doing my best to keep the data free from any judgement.

I noticed that the minutes recorded late arrivals, early departures, and other comings and goings during the meeting sessions. Not wanting to beat up on people needing to leave the room for, er, brief intervals, I adopted what I felt was the reasonable approach of ignoring any absence of 5 minutes or less. My attendance record does not penalise anyone who popped out to feed the parking meter or take an important phone call.

In hindsight, I wish that I had recorded every instance of absence, because after getting a long way into the data entry I noticed that one or two councillors were routinely 2 minutes late for the start of the meeting. Perhaps they didn’t miss anything past the “apologies” section of the agenda, but still, poor form.

The 5 minute cut-off turned out to be a good metric, though, because longer absences tended to be around 20 minutes or more. Since many of the meetings only ran for an hour, that was quite a lot of critical council business that was being missed. Where a councillor was in attendance, but missed more than 5 minutes of a meeting, I gave them a score of 0.5. Otherwise, they received full marks for attendance.

The scores

I have published the data that I captured from the Whangarei District Council Meeting Minutes on my GitHub data repository in .csv format. That data includes the attendance at every minuted council meeting since 30 October 2013, including all committees and subcommittees.

I am interested to see whether this information will help to inform voters when it comes time to elect a new council in October 2016. To this end, I have assembled some conveniently shareable “brag posts” for all aspiring candidates and civic-minded voters to share. You can find them all below, ranked in order of highest to lowest attendance scores for incumbent councillors.

I would encourage any #opendata or #opengov people to have a look and play around with the data to see if they could do something similar in their jurisdictions.

How many meetings has your councillor missed? was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How we’re looking after the participants at GovHack Whangarei

Free food is just one of the reasons to head along to your nearest #GovHackNZ event next month. Although it may be free, the saying “you get what you pay for” definitely doesn’t apply! At GovHack Whangarei we are going out of our way to source only the best food that the district has to offer, and we are using open data to do it.

Going on a data hunt

District councils are responsible for inspecting premises that prepare and sell food to the public. In the Whangarei district the council has passed a by-law that requires operators to display their food grade certificate on the premises. If you want to look up the grade before you arrive at the location, you can look up the food outlet using the council’s Food Grading Database Search.

It’s great that the council publishes this data on their site, but I wanted to have a play around with the data and put it into a map. There is no link that enables you to download the database, but the search function does enable the results to be returned based on grade or suburb. One way of pulling the data from the website is to select and copy the search results and put them into a spreadsheet for exporting as a csv file. The other option is one that I used to gather the same data set a year or so back before it was surfaced on the council’s website.

At an open data event put on by NetHui a couple of years back I found out about a super handy tool call Tabula, which extracts data from tables within pdf documents. I used this tool to select the data that was presented in the monthly reports to Council’s Planning Committee. After loading a pdf file into Tabula, you select all the tables you want to extract from within the document.

Once selected, Tabula gives you the option of copying the data tables to your clipboard, or saving them as a csv file. I used the latter option because I needed a csv file for geolocating the data.

Geolocating the data

If you want to make a basic web map of the data you can use Google’s My Maps. After creating a new map, you can open the csv file in a new map layer. That application will drop a pin on the addresses contained in the csv data table, and highlight any that it can’t find. For those, you can manually update the address data or drag the pins to the correct locations.

I wanted to do a bit more and display the data using CartoDB , so I used the geocoding plugin in QGIS to geolocate the address data. You can do this by importing the csv file into QGIS, running the tool, and then creating new latitude and longitude fields in the attribute table to hold the location data. From there, you can zip and upload the shapefile into CartoDB, allowing you to display the data in a web map.

See my map of food outlets in Whangarei coloured by grade

I had my own copy of this database from over a year ago, so the information I have also shows the grading certificates from previous inspections. That enables me to also see whether the grade is staying constant, increasing, or whether standards are slipping. That’s a metric that the live database doesn’t show, but I think it is important as an indication of behaviour. I’d prefer to eat food from an establishment that is getting better over time rather than worse!

Happy eating!

At GovHack Whangarei you can rest assured that we have gone the extra mile to make sure the food is great. It’s just one more reason for you to sign up for a weekend of awesome!

Want to have a play around with the data for yourself? I’ve published it here:

• https://github.com/Mashmatix/data/blob/master/FoodPremisesCleaned.csv
• https://spatialfusion.cartodb.com/viz/a53d1c22-36a2-11e6-8a18-0ecfd53eb7d3/public_map

Using data to avoid food poisoning was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve all felt the frustration of seeing things in our spaces which shouldn’t be there. Potholes, fly dumps, broken signage and streetlights, bad or nonexistent pedestrian walkways and crossings, and even rubbish bins in weird, not-useful places.

Read Nick’s post on putting rubbish bins in sane places

Yes, council websites have contact details on their websites, and one can email, call it in or, if they’re on social media (and actually using it), pop them a tweet or Facebook post.

But this isn’t always convenient, and it doesn’t lend itself to developing an open, publicly-accessible record of issues and their resolutions. People calling in issues is also _far_ more expensive for councils (think call centre staff, time, etc), which are under increasing budgetary pressure.

Fix my street, please

Enter FixMyStreet. The service has been around since 2007, and has been hugely successful overseas. Essentially, one reports an issue and its location, and the site automatically sends it through to the relevant council authorities.

Read MySociety’s case study on FixMyStreet UK

There’s also a New Zealand version, built by local dev and#opendata advocate Jonathan Hunt (otherwise known as @kayakr). It’s a great example of civic tech.

Why we keep banging on about civic tech

I was having a nosey around the site, and found myself wondering what a map of all issues — reported and fixed — might look like. It would be a great indication of a number of things, including:

• which councils were most (and least) responsive
• which councils had the most active reporters, and the least
• the extent to which people in NZ were using the service.

A lot of streets aren’t being fixed

So, I built a map.

I scraped the overview table in http://fixmystreet.org.nz/reports, and then set about cleaning up the data. The main bit which, yes, I ended up doing manually so I could get the precision I wanted, was getting all the markers properly geolocated.

For this, I looked up the physical office address of each of the 67 district and city councils’ in the list, and then geocoded those.

After this, I generated a bubble chart, which you can see, for new issues, fixed new issues, older issues and fixed older issues.

What you see below is the result, and is exactly why I love data visualisation so much. Popping everything onto a map gives one an immediate, intuitive understanding of what’s going on throughout NZ.

If you’re wondering why there are a number of councils missing, it’s because the map’s been set not to show any 0 values. So in cases where a council has had nothing reported nor fixed, it doesn’t display. The other possibility is that the council wasn’t on the FixMyStreet site at all, which I reckon counts as a very solid “nothing reported nor fixed”.

See the FixMyStreet NZ reports overview map and dataset

Taupo has a pretty active user base, and it looks like the council’s been very responsive! Less so councils like Wellington and Christchurch, where there’s a relatively active user base but less than a quarter of the reported issues have been fixed (or reported as fixed, at least).

And then there are the councils with an inactive or nonexistent user base, or councils which aren’t reporting fixing any (or very few) or the issues reported.

Why aren’t people engaging?

I know that the site sends automated emails to councils, so I can’t help but wonder: are councils not fixing these issues, or are they simply not reporting them as fixed? Both cases will, over time, dissuade people from using FixMyStreet, and potentially from trying to engage with council. These days, with councils increasingly wanting to be seen to be actively working on improving engagement, this seems like a Bad Thing.

The flip side is, of course — why aren’t people reporting issues using FixMyStreet? Is it because they don’t know about the services, or is it because they see a council which isn’t reporting issues as fixed, and so they stop bothering? Are there other reasons?

I propose two things:

• encouraging people to use services like FixMyStreet to report any and all issues they come across. It’s not complaining, or telling on people, or being negative. Quite the opposite! It’s about taking active pride in one’s places and spaces, and wanting them to be the best they can be for you and everyone around you. Services like FixMyStreet also benefit from network effects — the more people using it, the better it can become.
• getting councils to improve their response rate to issues. This is also a rich source of data for councils on what people are finding problematic, potential areas for improvement, and it’s a great way to show _everyone_ that they’re actively and positively engaging with the public.

Given the relative dearth of actual local government performance KPIs and data in New Zealand*, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on how my council is doing on FixMyStreet.

Because yes, while drawing amusing artwork** around potholes to force councils to finally fix them is amusing (and effective), I believe we can (all) do better :)

— — —

Disclaimer: of course, this is just an overview. It would certainly be fascinating to dive in a little, and look at what sorts of issues people are reporting, which issues get fixed and how long it takes, and so on.

I’d love to see what other people are generating with this sort of thing, or hear your ideas on what analyses you’d like to see!

— — —

* LGNZ is hoping to improve matters with its Local Government Excellence Programme

* Amusing and effective pothole artwork (warning, potentially NSFW)

Who’s fixing our streets? was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Litter really annoys me. It’s not just that it is environmentally damaging and a horrible eyesore. It’s not because it also highlights the presence of socially irresponsible people in my community. It annoys me because I’m constantly having to pick up other people’s litter from my lawn.

McDonald’s packaging, drink bottles, ice block sticks, and pie wrappers are the most prevalent. I began stockpiling the items I picked up to see how much litter was finding its way onto my lawn over the course of a month. I gave up after filling a 10 litre bucket full in just over a week. What I discovered though, is that a pattern was beginning to form.

The ‘perfect storm’ for junk food

First, let me explain where my house is situated. I live in a residential area of the city on one of the popular routes between the outer suburbs and the nearby town centre. My property is about 300 metres up the road from the town centre. It has a bunch of retail shops, food outlets, and the local high school. Further up the road about 2 blocks beyond my place towards the suburbs is a local dairy and takeaway shop.

In the mornings before school, students would walk past my place on their way to class. In the afternoon, they would wander back home again in groups of two or three at a time. It was relatively common to see students munching on a pie or sipping a drink on their way to school. On their return trip, brown paper bags from McDonald’s seemed to be their items of choice.

It wasn’t until I started building my little stockpile that I began to take notice of what passers-by carried with them. And then I realised. I lived a ice block eating distance from the dairy, and a Big Mac Combo eating distance from McDonald’s!

I have a theory

I decided to test my hypothesis by popping up to the shop and buying a pie. The temperature was perfect. Not too hot, not too cold. I set off back down the road munching on my pie, and by the time I got to my last mouth full … well, well, well. Right outside my house.

During my experimental pie trip I observed another phenomenon. There was a rubbish bin right outside the dairy, but there was nowhere to sit and eat. Why would anyone buy takeaway food and stand outside the shop to eat it? Does there really need to be a bin there? I found myself deeply fascinated by the weird and wonderful places bins had been placed in my town relative to seats and food outlets!

Time to assemble the data

I fired up my GIS software QGIS and loaded up a basemap showing the streets for my local area. Next, I needed the locations of all the nearby food outlets. For this I used the points of interest from Zenbu which can be downloaded from the Koordinates website.

I also needed the locations of rubbish bins and public seating areas to be able to test my theory. That information hasn’t been published anywhere that I can find, so it was time to start digitising. For this I cruised the streets using Google Street View and as I saw bins and seats, I digitised them in QGIS from the high resolution aerial photos I downloaded from LINZ data service.

For visualisation purposes, I exported the layers from QGIS as kml files so I could open them in Google MyMaps. What I discovered is that there are a hell of a lot or rubbish bins along the main shopping strip, and sod all anywhere else. Often the bins were sited right next to public seating, which makes sense. A few public seating areas had no bins, and in other places there was a bin every 15 metres! You can have a browse at the resulting map here.

I noticed something else during the data capture process. It seemed that the bus stops that had seats also had rubbish bins, but those that didn’t have seats didn’t have bins either. I could check this by downloading the bus stop locations from the Northland Regional Council’s open data service. Well, I thought I could, but that data set is not shared on that platform. You can get slightly dated Whangarei bus stop information on Koordinates.

Throwing bus stop locations into the mix, my suspicions were confirmed. There is pretty much no pattern or obvious logic behind rubbish bin locations. So the next question is, where should the rubbish bins be placed?

Burger eating time!

The next thing to work out is how far people walk before finishing that Big Mac Combo. From my urban planning background, I know that 400m is the distance that people will generally walk to a shop or bus stop. That might provide a useful guide for an upper limit of the people will walk while eating. Google tells me that the average walking speed is 5km/hr, but I’m guessing that most people won’t be walking at full pace if they are trying to get food in their mouth.

Adjusting for a slower walking speed (say 3km/hr) it would take 8 minutes to walk 400m. Seems a reasonable time to eat a burger while on the move. It would be a bit quicker to down an ice block or bottle of soft drink. In the 5 minutes it took you to consume these, you would have travelled 250 metres. Time to start plotting those travel distances.

Classifying the eateries

There are a few different types of food outlets. Some offer dining facilities, such as eat-in restaurants, taverns and cafes. Others mainly supply take home meals such as burgers, fish & chips, or sushi. Some places supply food and beverages that you can’t consume on the move, like bulk food wholesalers, butchers, and liquor outlets. The remaining category are the ones that offer snack foods like fizzy drinks, ice blocks, and pies.

For the purposes of my exercise I grouped the food outlets into the following categories and then mapped a radius distance of 250 metres for snack outlets, and 400 metres for takeaway meals. I left out the outlets that don’t offer eat while walking food options.

• Eat In (0m)
• Takeaway meal (400m)
• Snacks (250m)

The results were very revealing, and just as I suspected, my house is right on the storm front where all those lines bunch up and overlap!

Time to pretty it up

I zipped all the shape files I had created and loaded them into CartoDB. The existing rubbish bins I displayed as a heat map to illustrate how ridiculously close together they are in the main street. The walking distances were shown as semi-transparent polygons to be able to visualise the overlaps relative to the streets. It was very easy to see where the last mouth fulls of food were being consumed, so time to start thinking about where bins should be located.

There are lots of dog owners around this area (I am one of them) and the street network provides for a variety of walking loops. As you can tell from the large distances between rubbish bins, responsible dog owners end up having to carry bags of poop for quite a distance. The most convenient locations for bins for dog owners are at intersections, which is where the various walking loops overlap.

The final task was to locate intersections along the main walking routes that were at the point where people were looking for somewhere to put that pie wrapper or empty bottle. I created a new layer in CartoDB, marked each of these points, and voila!

You can view my recommended locations for rubbish bins here by clicking on the following map link. Yes, I’m talking to you Whangarei District Council!

Stop putting rubbish bins in all the wrong places! was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dropping the jargon from my planning evidence on the Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan

There has been ongoing coverage on the topic of housing supply in Auckland and the effect of this on housing affordability. The government has recently announced a new National Policy Statement on Urban Housing Capacity in response to the growing concerns expressed by commentators and many an aspiring property owner.

While most town planning professionals have a view on what the solutions might be, their voices are seldom heard in mainstream media coverage on the topic. I know this causes much frustration in professional circles, but I believe that the professionals need to look at the way they communicate generally.

Say it how you mean it

In May 2015 I presented evidence to the Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel. Hundreds of other experts and technical witnesses did as well. There is some excellent (and some abysmally poor) material buried in that information which is completely inaccessible to humans. Sure, you can find it on the hearing panel’s website, but that does not make it accessible.

My own evidence, for example, was 21 pages long and riddled with the jargon that permeates the resource management profession here in New Zealand. Mine is more readable than most because I make a conscious effort to explain things simply. If you are up to it, you can read the full version of my evidence by downloading the pdf version from here.

My clients (who are human) told me they understood and were happy with my written evidence. But I remain curious about how differently I would have written it if my audience was blog readers rather than lawyers, judges, and resource management professionals. So let’s see how this goes!

Statement of evidence

I hold post-graduate qualifications in Land Planning & Development and Spatial Science and have been working in the planning profession for 22 years. Ten years ago I was responsible for developing the rural parts of the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy dealing with exactly the same problems that have STILL NOT BEEN RESOLVED to this day. Let’s just say that I’m frustratingly experienced on this topic!

I represent a number of landowners who have an interest in the southern areas of the Auckland region, but the conclusions I reach are equally applicable throughout rural Auckland. On the topic of rural subdivision, my views are simple:

• The council is confused about what “rural production” means.
• The rules will not do what the council wants them to.
• The council needs to provide for “infill” development in rural areas.

The issues facing rural Auckland

The Council states that the two most significant issues facing rural Auckland are:

• Declining rural production.
• Increasing “reverse sensitivity” effects.

“Reverse sensitivity” is a term that refers to a situation where existing “objectionable” uses that typically produce noise or odours (think quarries and pig farms) are forced to close down by people moving in next to them and then complaining about their effects.

Despite the suggested severe risk that these issues have on Auckland’s economy, there is little evidence to prove that this is the case. The argument is further muddied by the Council’s interpretation that “rural” means anything that is “not urban”.

Council’s approach

The Council’s plan argues that these issues facing rural areas are caused by lifestyle development happening outside the areas Council has set aside for that type of development. These lifestyle zones are said to be strategically located because they are already heavily developed, have lower soil productivity, and are close to existing urban settlements.

The Council states that there are 20,000 vacant rural sites that could be built on without requiring further subdivision or development consents. It is accepted by the Council that productive farms are almost always made up of several titles. Because of this, the mere sale of vacant titles to individual owners will result in lower land productivity.

The Council is attempting to address this by preventing the further subdivision and development of rural properties. It says that it has provided incentives for the building rights that exist on vacant tiles to be “sold” to other landowners in lifestyle zones and urban villages. In other words, to get additional development rights, those owners can pay rural property owners to amalgamate their vacant titles back together again.

Here’s the problem

If the Council provides no supply for housing in rural areas, but people want to build a house in the rural area, what will happen? I expect that those people will look to buy one of the existing 20,000 rural sites that the Council says are currently vacant. Many of these sites by the Council’s own admission form part of productive farms. The Council’s approach makes it more attractive for farmers to sell off their titles to people who want to live in rural areas!

If one takes a look at where the allocated lifestyle zones are located, they take almost no account of the existing topography or settlement patterns. Some areas zoned as “rural production” are already developed to a density of around 1 dwelling per hectare. In other areas, “lifestyle zones” are currently rolling pasture on some of the region’s most elite soils. It is quite apparent that the Council has coloured in their maps wrong.

Outcomes sought

The outcomes that are sought for Auckland’s rural areas are pretty straight forward:

1. Make sure rural productive land is kept for growing things

2. Try to keep rural areas looking and feeling “rural” (yes that includes smells)

3. Make sure lifestylers don’t complain about rural activities

With this in mind, I suggest that the Council start over with colouring their planning maps and zonings. They also need to re-think their subdivision rules. Although rather than just suggesting it, I decided to do it for them. Here’s what I have done.

A new zoning methodology

Start with an aerial photo of the region, and plot the locations of existing dwellings. If the Council doesn’t have that information, electricity companies generally have the GPS locations of their power meters. If they don’t want to share that data, I have found that the electoral address data is sufficiently accurate at a regional scale for this purpose.

By overlaying the land parcel data, all of the rural properties (which historically have been defined as sites larger than 20ha) can be selected. To provide further evidence of rural land uses, I selected all areas used as “cropland” in the Ministry for the Environment’s Land Cover Database.

Further overlays can be applied taking into account soil quality, and the presence of rivers and their margins which should be protected from farming activities. A colour gradient can be used to illustrate those areas of the region that are best for growing food. These are the areas that should be preserved if we are to tick off outcome number one, so subdivision and development in these areas should be restricted.

Outcome number 2 was to keep rural areas looking rural. To keep the density of dwellings similar to what already exists, we need to turn back to look at the existing development patterns again. To get a sense of this, I worked out the density of buildings in the “productive” areas (being the sites over 20 hectares). Divide the total area by the total number of houses and you get one dwelling per 41 hectares.

While I had this data at my fingertips, I also decided to run a quick check of the “20,000 vacant parcels” figure that the Council was relying on. By selecting all the parcels that didn’t have a dwelling on them, I found there were about 100 vacant sites in my sample area. As I had expected, they were of a size and in locations that you would certainly not be wanting to encourage more houses.

The third outcome sought by the Auckland Unitary Plan is to make sure lifestyle owners don’t complain about the farmer next door. To map the “sphere of influence” of existing lifestyle areas, I drew a 112m radius (4 hectare area / 10 acre block) around existing dwellings. Where three or more of these 4 hectare circles overlap, that “cluster” generally has more of a lifestyle character than a rural one. The protections (or rules) should be different in these areas to what is allowed in production areas.

To make sure that agricultural practices do not impact of houses, animal pens and effluent ponds are required to be 250 metres away from any houses on neighbouring sites. These 250m setbacks can be mapped.

The resulting map shows the areas of productive land (in blue) that should be kept free of housing or subdivisions. The cloud-shaped magenta colours show those areas that have a lifestyle character. From this map, it is possible to highlight all the land where it is possible to build further away from farming activities than any existing house. These are the areas I call “rural infill” where lifestylers are separated from farmers.

For the sake of completeness, I also mapped other areas where housing development should be avoided, such as coastal hazards and ecologically sensitive areas, quarries, or outstanding landscape features.

It’s so simple

It turns out that it is possible to deal with the issues facing rural Auckland without messing up outcomes the Council is seeking. By using open data and a bit of common sense, the answer is surprisingly simple. It’s a pity that the Council’s ruler seems to have gotten in the way of a great solution.

If a planning expert spoke human was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My journey through the underworld of planning regulations

A few of my clients are specialist property professionals. They are either property developers, investors, agents, or brokers that spend a lot of their time trawling through town planning documents and property reports. By “a lot of their time”, I mean they do this practically every day. They are power users of the local council’s land information data. I was one of them, until I got totally pissed off with dealing with some of the more pedantic members of the planning industry. Since then I have spent most of my time interpreting local government data and communicating it to my clients, who are mostly humans (as distinct from those in the field who do not know how to speak human). The typical response to my work from my human clients is “why on earth does the council not illustrate it that way?”

The brief

The most recent project to arrive on my desk came from a commercial real estate agent. He finds that many of his clients have trouble visualising what a property would look like with their business and brand occupying the space. My job usually entails taking a particular site or building and giving it a digital fit-out using tools like Trimble Sketchup and Google Earth to render some static images or videos that can be shown to a prospective tenant. I also have a background in town planning, so I can make sure that the digital redevelopment of the site actually meets the council’s planning and development standards.

Step 1: Construct a building

Sometimes I am tasked with giving an existing building a makeover. Those are fairly straight forward, as Sketchup has features that enable a building to be digitized from a perspective photograph of the existing buildings on the site. After modelling the existing building, all you then need to do is swap out the cladding and glazing for one that fits with the client’s tastes. Other times I am dealing with a vacant site, so the Google 3D Warehouse becomes the go to place to find ‘stock’ models that fit the client’s specifications.

In this case the client was a nation-wide business that has premises all around the country. They provided me with plans and elevations for one of their recent builds, so it was a straightforward exercise to construct a 3D model of the plans. So far, so good.

Step 2: Locate and digitize the site

This step was also fairly straight forward. Bang the property address into Google Maps, and there it is. Well not exactly. That’s where the site generally is (the location of the point address) but it does not show the location of the legal property boundaries. For that I had a couple of options. I could have gone to the ultimate source of the truth for property data in New Zealand (Land Information NZ), which has a great spatial data service. In this case I needed the local council zoning information, so I chose to use Whangarei District Council’s web service instead.

From the GIS web service I could search by site address, which takes me to the correct site complete with parcel boundaries highlighted. A handy feature of this GIS site is the ability to download a copy of the map (complete with scale bar), which is what I needed to digitise the site into Sketchup. This also allowed me to see the boundaries of the adjoining properties, which were colour-coded by their zoning — super handy! Bang that map into Sketchup and rescale to 1:1 using the scale bar, and then on to Step 3: annotating the land development controls.

Step 3: Prepare to get confused

The district planning maps show the site as being zoned Business 3. I turn to the rules for that zone by going to the table of contents and clicking on the relevant chapter. It promptly downloads a pdf version of the rules. Not an uncommon format, but not ideal either. So let’s jump straight in to see what the rules are.

Prohibited activities are the most restricted things that can be done under the Resource Management Act 1991. By that I mean they can’t be done. At all. You can’t even ask for permission. I figured that the client is unlikely to be keeping radioactive materials on site, so spared myself having to work out how to measure 1000 terabequerels.

Permitted activities under the Resource Management Act do not require any planning approval (resource consent) at all, so ideally you’d want to fit within those rules. The site I’m looking at is right next door to a residential zone so there are some limits around operating hours.

The nested rule takes some deciphering, but it basically says if you’re within 50m of the boundary, you can’t operate between 10pm and 6am. By drawing a 50m buffer from the common boundary, I am able to map the extent of land affected by this rule. Next up are the requirements for car parking.

If you wish to have parking on site the standard of construction is set out elsewhere in the planning rules and engineering guidelines. For the purposes of my model, I needed to make sure that there are no car parks within 2m of the road boundary. This is simple enough to illustrate by buffering the road boundary by 2m. Be careful if there is any plan to fence the boundary though, because any fences with that 2m buffer area are limited to a maximum height of 2m. So many things to cross check against! Ugh.

Once again it is possible to map this requirement by adding a 2m height limit along property boundaries. Although, there are extra things to think about when there is a residential zone next door, as was the case here. If you wish to store things outdoors, then they need to be screened from residential neighbours, so make sure you don’t stack things higher than 2m.

By now you will be noticing a pattern. Combinations of cryptic rules nested into tables are terribly difficult to follow. I’ll spare you the other dozen or so rules that I had to work my way through, but I will show you the clincher.

Step 4: Are you kidding me?

The next part starts off fairly well. It’s the ‘building rule table’, which sets out the nitty gritty rules about where on a site you can build. It’s what I needed to know so that my model was placed in a way that does not trigger any planning consent requirements.

Maximum height of buildings is 11m. No problem. I simply selected the ground layer in Sketchup, elevate a copy of it by 11m, and then highlighted and coloured it semi-transparent. It was the second part of that rule that became a bit more challenging. The site adjoins a residential zone so the ‘daylight angle’ of the adjoining Living 1 Environment (residential zone) needed to be complied with.

So what does the daylight angle rule say? Well here is the rule, which largely repeats the previous rule and then directs you to an entirely different part of the rule book.

It’s at this point that you would wish that you’d paid more attention during your trigonometry class.

I’ve been working with rules like this for years, and I still find this confusing. Describing requirements in this way is what keeps council processes out of reach of the general public. On days when I’m feeling particularly skeptical, I suspect that some within the industry want to keep it a dark art. Who knows. I would prefer that people understand council rules so that they can make informed decisions on their own, without having to consult a property professional at great cost.

So how could it be done better? Maybe use a bit of off-the-shelf software that actually shows things in 3D. It’s 2016, people. We have the technology. Let’s start using it.

No wonder people break council rules was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whangarei is gorgeous (but unmapped).

Truly. It’s a very, very beautiful place. And so intertwined with the nature around it.

Being a Wellingtonian and therefore fortunate enough that my council publicly releases data on dog-accessible areas, I was expecting the same when pooch and I came for a winter sojourn in Whangarei.

I was so very wrong.

An awful lot of the tracks and trails around here don’t allow dogs anywhere near them. This is a conservation measure, and one I understand. But when one has to assume that any given trail _doesn’t_ allow dogs, making sure one gets it right becomes doubly important.

The Whangarei District Council does have a page which tells one about dog exercise areas, but many of those locations are near impossible to find on the internet, and there’s no address or GIS data at _all_.

WDC’s dog exercise areas page

I’ve got a request in for all their data, but in the meantime, I started mapping my walks. The idea was to build a resource of places where one can (because I have) taken my beloved pooches for runs and walks — a resource that’s publicly accessible, and to which others can add over time.

Something which lives :)

For now, the map’s primary home is on Google Maps

Mapping your own walkies

And hence to the point of this post. I was asked “how do you DO this? Because I’d like to do it where I live”.

So, here you go.

1. Download onto your smart phone an exercise app which can take GPS records of your exercise. Runkeeper and MapMyRun / MapMyWalk / MapMyFitness do this, as I’m sure do lots of others.
2. Go for a walk/run/cycle, making sure the app is on and tracking your route as you go.
3. Return home, rehydrate and feel smug about having got Exercise and Data simultaneously.
4. Export the data from your trip. The exact process will be a bit different for different apps, but check their support sections for instructions. Essentially you’ll be pulling down a .gpx or .kml file — or a .zip file containing a bunch of .kml/.gpx files.
5. Decide where you want to put your track. Your options include, but aren’t limited to, Google Earth and OpenStreetMap. Each has its own pros and cons, so I’d suggest having a play with both.
6. If you want to format your map and have it look _extra_ beautiful, you can pull the data into something like CartoDB (my current favourite), MapBox (also awesome), Kartograph (requires more coding ability), or one of a host of others. Again, experimenting will help you decide what works best for you, and why.

With all the above systems, you can spend countless happy seconds to hours playing with formatting, base map type, and basically how it all displays and works.

And that’s basically it. Each of those sites have detailed instructions for how to do just about anything you could possibly want to and, of course, when in doubt Ask Google — that’s how I’ve learned, anyway.

So, go forth and play! Because it’s awesome, and fun, and makes things.

Any issues or confusions? Give me a shout.

— — —

Linky goodness

Mapping kids ‘n dogs — a map built in MapBox

NZ coworking spaces — a map built in CartoDB

MapBox

CartoDB

Kartograph

OpenStreetMap

— — —

Mapping your walkies was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the third week of February 2014, I did something that has never before been attempted in local government anywhere in the world. Using the Google Ventures design sprint format, and a hyper-transparent approach to service design, we drafted a regulatory town plan in just five days. The whole event unfolded on Facebook, and you can still check out the page for the Kamo Place Race to see how it went.

What you are not able to see on that page is what the experience was like for the small council team that was heading into the complete unknown. I have shown this story to a few other local government innovators before, and every one of them has said this was exactly their experience as well.

Meet Rick, the city planning manager

Confessions of a local government innovator was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.