chris coldewey

“they’re just a popularity contest”

Voting, and especially social media voting in a cause marketing platform, is a popularity contest. That popularity brings people to a branded site which creates exposure to the contest organizer. The formula is pretty standard there. Ultimately, a degree of any competition has to do with the ability to rally support – be it a student council vote, or voting in the AMEX Member’s Project. Inherently there’s a hope that a democratic process like voting yields a valid outcome.

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The way that I view the Aviva Community Fund is in two phases – the marketing phase, and the cause phase. The marketing phase (up to selecting the finalists) is 100% participant chosen, and 100% the result of an idea’s ability to rally voters. The cause side (judging) narrows the finalist ideas to the winners using detailed criteria designed to identify the most deserving projects with the biggest impact. I reiterate, we find the best idea from a sub-set selected based on popularity. The most deserving ideas get funding.

Patrick Glinski of Idea Couture discusses the Aviva Community Fund crowdfunding platform and addresses some of the pushback to social change voting contests.

As of this year, 52 percent of all Egyptians are under the age of 25, and one in five is between the ages of 15-24–the ages of many of those out in the streets demonstrating against the government. When Mubarak took office, there were 9 million youth aged 15-24, and now there are 17 million, according to data from the UN Population Division. That’s a lot of people to be dissatisfied with the difficulty of finding jobs, paying the bills, and saving money to marry and raise a family. To be sure, the mere presence of this large youth population would not, on its own, spark a revolution. But it was dry tinder waiting for the spark, which seemed to have been lit in Tunisia.

Time: 2020. Place: Mount Pleasant.

The business streets look mostly the same, but there’s a different atmosphere, literally, because the air is cleaner. The broad sidewalks accommodate tables spilling out from restaurants in the summer. A street car runs down Main. Bicyclists still prefer bikeways over the main roads, but there are more of them on the main roads because there is more room and less exhaust to breathe. Apparently, the less people drive, the less they want to drive, because people are increasingly choosing active and public transportation over getting in their cars. Nearly a quarter of the cars are electric and car share lots provide a convenient solution for trips with big loads. Ski and recreation buses make regular morning and evening trips so it’s easy to get to and from the mountains.   

A scenario of Vancouver in 2020 with the Greenest City goals in place, by planners Lindsay Cole and Amanda Mitchell, and Vancouver Observer writer Carrie Saxifrage.

Fantastic to see Vancouver planners creating tangible future visions — scenarios like this can be excellent communication tools in a way that lists of targets and goals cannot. I would love to see more future scenarios for the many slices of Vancouver beyond Mt. Pleasant-dwelling composting woodworkers. Keep them coming!

Big cities have a statistical advantage because the agglomeration of people, more intense social interactions, and better developed infrastructures invoke efficiencies and speed up the pace at which things happen. This is a worldwide, historic fact and does not much depend on what is particular or special in a given city, he says.

The researchers have shown, in fact, that with each doubling of city population, each inhabitant is, on average, 15 percent wealthier, 15 percent more productive, 15 percent more innovative, and 15 percent more likely to be victimized by violent crime regardless of the city’s geography or the decade in which you pull the data.

Remarkably, this 15 percent rule holds for a number of other statistics as well – so much so that if you tell Bettencourt and West the population of an anonymous city, they can tell you the average speed at which its inhabitants walk.

Scientists call this phenomenon “superlinear scaling.” Rather than metrics increasing proportionally with population – in a “linear,” or one-for-one fashion – measures that scale superlinearly increase consistently at a nonlinear rate greater than one for one.

A new way to quantifiably assess characteristics of cities and performance regarding different socioeconomic indicators (safety, innovation, productivity, walking speed, almost anything…). The cool thing is that its not just relative to other cities, but relative to what a city’s performance *should be* given its size.

via kottke

These are good times indeed for Chongqing, home to 32 million people and growing so quickly its maps are already out of date by the time they are printed. The bursting municipality — a dense urban core ringed by rapidly changing rural districts that together are about the size of Austria and now have more people than Iraq — is the gateway to China’s fast-filling west. Ambitions and limitations collide there at the same spectacular speed with which the city has exploded and, along with it, the prospects of its luckier residents.

Foreign Policy on the rise of Chongqing.