[OSGeo-Alberta] Project Proposal: Community Development Response Toolkit

[Jeremy Squires]

Executive Summary:

Ordinary folks are frequently called upon to comment on land use and development proposals that are in their neighbourhoods, but lack the tools to provide effective feedback relevant to the urban planning process. This proposal is to develop a single tool that combines the capabilities of a number of Open Source Geospatial tools that will allow an average skill non-expert user to generate geospatial analytic assets for inclusion in a response to a land use amendment or development permit application.

Background:

At the Alberta OS Geo chapter meeting January 9th, a request for proposals was floated, looking for something that the chapter could build together. Over the past couple of years I have been involved in a number of community responses to land use and development proposals in the City of Calgary and have cobbled together tools to make the responses as effective as possible, covering many Geospatial aspects of development regulations. I felt that the amount of time spent and expertise required to use these tools raised the bar too high for most people, reducing the quality of communities' abilities to respond. To confirm that there is a real need for a better way to do this, I reached out to the planning director of my local community association, the Bridgeland Riverside Community Association (BRCA), sharing with her the proposal that follows. She was very excited by the idea and agreed to provide feedback to the process. It was at this point that I reached out to Scott McHale to confirm that this has sufficient potential to propose it to the chapter, and this is the result.

Ask:

Please evaluate this proposal for fitness to be included as a project of the Alberta Chapter of OS Geo. I haven't been given a list of criteria for acceptance, but I would think that at a minimum: 1: Does it involve developing Open Source Geospatial tools? 2: Is it within the technical capabilities and interests of the group? 3: Is it small enough to complete, but large enough to be interesting? 4: Is there a real need? 5: Is there an end user group to provide requirements, feedback, and to drive validation of the work? Please also expand on these categories so we can better evaluate and improve proposals and come up with even better ideas.

Proposal:

Not sure how attachments are handled on this list, so I'm going to include the 100 lines of this project proposal directly in the body of the email. It's in Markdown, so if you want to see a nicer format you can pull this into your favorite editor.

# Community Development Response Toolkit

When land use or development proposals are under review, community members are asked to provide feedback. The timeline for submissions could provide a reasonable window for good responses, but responders are limited by the technology and the information available to them. The most important evaluation criteria for proposals is often numerically precise, but without the tools to evaluate the proposals on that basis and compare against the rules, the responses lack the precision to make a convincing case.

Individuals who are motivated to make responses to proposals are neighbors of the property in question. As such they represent an average cross section of city dwellers, a majority of whom are not experts in planning, geomatics, image processing, or even power users of computers. If they are lucky, their local community association will have a planning committee that does contain people with these skills. In other cases, the individuals may know someone who can provide the skills needed to prepare a response. In most cases, the individual may be left doing the best they can with their limited knowledge.

## Personas

These are the three personas that the toolkit will need to address:

* Responder/Neighbour/Home Owner
    - No technical expertise
    - Basic word processing, browsing, etc.
    - Knows their own needs, what has been proposed, and how it impacts them
* Ally
    - Computer setup, installation, and software usage skills
    - Probably has never run a command line tool
    - Not a domain expert in relevant areas
* Community planning advocate
    - Expert in the rules of the proposal and response process
    - Background in planning, architecture, building, and real estate
    - Exposure to GIS and Architectural tools, casual user level or better
    - Knowledge of the local development history and the political situation

## Parameters of the Problem

### Geospatial Elements

Development regulations often have geospatial elements. These include:

* Height
* Massing
* Canopy
* Sightlines
* Visibility
* Privacy
* Shadowing
* Drainage
* Access to and from the property
* Proximity to city resources and other building types

### Architectural Elements

#### Numeric

Many planning rules are related to interior architectural aspects of the proposal. Example: number of living units / building footprint. The calculation of the most commonly used metrics for proposals should be supported.

While most of these interior elements of a building might not have problem statements that are obviously geospatial, they are spatial mathematical problems and there might be opportunities for creative uses of algorithms such as minimum spanning trees, shortest distances, and so on, to bring up aspects of the building that might influence the approval process.

One good example I have seen in practice was the calculation of how much light an internal apartment would experience, given the number and orientation of windows. This would be a problem that would draw on many geospatial algorithms such as insolation at various times of the year, refraction (through glass rather than through air), etc.

#### Aesthetic

There are parameters associated with architectural aspects of the proposal which also have a visual element that could be treated from an image processing and analysis point of view:

* Context
    - Fitting in with its surroundings
* Variety
    - Differing from its surroundings

## Tools In Use

* Google Maps/Earth
    - Street views
    - Satellite imagery
    - Road networks
    - Measuring plugins
* City planning maps
    - ArcGIS Server/MapServer/GeoServer
* Screen Capture Tools
* Word Processing
    - Word/LibreOffice
* Image Processing
    - Paint/Gimp
* Calculators
    - To compare numerical elements of the proposal against rules

## Functionality

The goal of the responder is to generate a PDF of their comments about the land use or development proposal and submit that as a single document via email or the web to the proposal review process.

All the tools used will need to have a means of exporting to formats that can be imported or combined into a single output file in PDF format.

The end user should not have to manually coordinate the import of all the output components into a final report. For example, the output artifacts could be collated automatically and made available in a single list where they can be included, excluded, annotated, or moved around before inclusion in the reporting tool.

* Analysis
    - Support all the geospatial and numerical elements of a response
* Cartography
    - Display elements of analysis such as distances to city resources
* 3D Imagery
    - Capture views of the proposal area from different angles and altitudes
    - Allow import of shapes showing structural aspects of the proposal
    - Allow application of textures to shapes showing visual aspects of proposal
* Reporting
    - Automatically pull together output from other sources
    - Generate a single PDF output
* Coordination
    - Single interface from which all response activities are initiated
    - Provide guidance and advice on the submission process

All comments and suggestions welcome.

Thanks,

Jeremy

-- 
  Jeremy Squires
  Calgary, AB   CANADA
  Email: uncle_edge at jetemail.net