Needs, and Opportunities
Goals
High need (current functions with little to no existing capacity)
Low need (functions we sufficiently take care of for now)
Moderate need (current functions with more capacity needed)
Develop and maintain values and ethics, and align processes to embody them
Opportunities (potential functions)
Oversee and curate contributed content
Develop methodology for advanced qualitative research (like interviews, community relationships, site observation, photography, audio/video)
Initiate and push research visioning/opportunities
Develop and foster research partnerships
Audience engagement/interactive content point person/liaison (like our Hackathon initiative of walking tours)
Develop methodology and content for white paper research
Support and manage interns
Develop methodology and best practices for academic research
Collect and maintain city and other datasets
Nuisances research
Language, style & voice
Environment and hazards research
Mapping - stylized data visualization and creative mapping
Graphics & imagery
Education research
Real estate research
Research integrity - need source documentation consistency and less reliance on media
Develop and push template and style for storytelling of place
Infrastructure and development research
Resiliency research
Public policy research
Push content creativity
Data and institutional knowledge management
Data science connection/understanding
Find/provide professional development opportunities for planners (OJ is good at this)
Continue with neighborhood research
Stephen has volunteered to gather and organize important shapefiles and datasets for us to be able to more easily incorporate data and analysis into our insights. This also helps fulfill the need for infrastructure and development research.
Is this a weakness? We purport to be a real estate company and do our research and writing in the context of its meaning for real estate, but none of us are truly that knowledgeable about the real estate market or how it works. We read a lot of articles about it, but much of that goes over our heads...
Alon: you can learn (Amy didn't formally study real-estate also). But you are first and foremost experts on urban planning and urban life in general. you don't need to perform advanced analysis of market trends and prices, we got yoni the DS to do it. But you are expected to understand the data and terminology, and be able to connect it to topic you write about in the analyst insights
Stephen has volunteered to be a liaison between the urban planning team and the photographer/designer in helping us be smarter about gathering, sharing, and tracking the use of images/graphics.
Very important that someone begin to survey the literature so that we have go-to studies and statistics for some of the bigger topics we write about.
Andrew has volunteered to take the lead on this one
Beth!!
I don't think we need to task this out, but something we should all keep in mind and strive for. Grace and Beth have done a really nice job writing about place.
Alon: I don't think we should develop a template for this.One of the few insights where the context of place and your own voice are very important. Here is where Amy's input will be precious
Stephen has volunteered to take ownership over the contributed content outreach strategy and organization of contributor insights (should this become a priority again).
Andrew will take the lead after the launch
Community-based (journalistic-style?) research
Create a board of experts to consult.