What follows are the notes that the project manager posted on the Google Doc in the morning and structured much of our work through out the day.
Nature of the task
“The USDOT is encouraging cities to put forward their best and most creative ideas for innovatively addressing the challenges they are facing. The vision of the Smart City Challenge is to demonstrate and evaluate a holistic, integrated approach to improving surface transportation performance within a city and integrating this approach with other smart city domains such as public safety, public services, and energy. The USDOT intends for this challenge to address how emerging transportation data, technologies, and applications can be integrated with existing systems in a city to address transportation challenges. The USDOT seeks bold and innovative ideas for proposed demonstrations to effectively test, evaluate, and demonstrate the significant benefits of smart city concepts.” (Source: DOT notice of funding opportunity)Framing Idea
Smart Oakland has produced more than a framing concept; rather, it has led us to a formula: “Your Ideas + Your City = The Future of Smart”What is the genre of the work? What are our expectations for this genre?
Creative non-fiction. The words “creative” and “nonfiction” describe the form. The word “creative” refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques fiction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfiction— factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The goal is to make nonfiction stories read like fiction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy. The word “creative” has been criticized in this context because some people have maintained that being creative means that you pretend or exaggerate or make up facts and embellish details. This is completely incorrect. It is possible to be honest and straightforward and brilliant and creative at the same time. "Creative” doesn’t mean inventing what didn’t happen, reporting and describing what wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that the writer has a license to lie. The cardinal rule is clear—and cannot be violated. This is the pledge the writer makes to the reader—the maxim we live by, the anchor of creative nonfiction: “You can’t make this stuff up!” (Source)
City of Oakland, State of the City Address (2045)Who is telling this story and why?
Oakland Mayor “Liberty Cheng,” State of the City Address, 2045.
Significance of name: first name not only resonates with “Libby,” but also stands for “freedom” and “self-determination”; the surname “Cheng” means “rule, order, regulation, procedure, journey”. As such, our future mayor’s name expresses one of the organizing principles of Oakland’s smart city-initiative: “creating and supporting a just and sustainable space of structured freedom or play (a never ending journey of discovery and development supporting and supported by the entire community). “Ladders of opportunity” presuppose such a space.
As a 7th grader, Liberty was busy with school and enjoyed spending time with her friends; she was aware of the problems and challenges facing her community, as some of these shaped her life on a daily or even hourly basis. [Add a couple of details from WOSP or other available sources]
A couple of weeks after getting back to school from the New Year break, Liberty’s science teacher introduced a lesson plan that had not been on the calendar the previous month: “Our city needs your help…” Under the direction of her teacher and with a couple of surprise visits from the City traffic engineers, Liberty and her classmates used the Y-PLAN methodology... The map she made for “The Future of Smart” didn’t win her any prizes. This was the first time that Liberty thought of herself as something bigger than her family or circle of friends or basketball team. This was the first time she thought of herself as a member of her community...as a resident of the City of Oakland. And with that sense of membership or belonging came as sense of both rights and responsibilities….
How is the work and the details within the work organized? What is the significance of this organization?
Mayor Liberty Cheng’s State of the City Address may have the following organizations: Current > Past > Future.
Significance of name: first name not only resonates with “Libby,” but also stands for “freedom” and “self-determination”; the surname “Cheng” means “rule, order, regulation, procedure, journey”. As such, our future mayor’s name expresses one of the organizing principles of Oakland’s smart city-initiative: “creating and supporting a just and sustainable space of structured freedom or play (a never ending journey of discovery and development supporting and supported by the entire community). “Ladders of opportunity” presuppose such a space.
What are the qualities of the protagonist?
Mayor Liberty Cheng is the living embodiment of her city: physically, she is neither tall nor short, not a stunner but attractive and takes care of herself; she is confident, yet compassionate; fearless, but not reckless; proud of her personal identity and that of her city, but a skilled leader whose power derives from her ability to form alliances with other cities and strategic partners.What is the plot of the individual/city's life?
In 2016, Liberty Cheng was a 7th grader at West Oakland Middle School. Her father, originally from LA, started as a forklift driver and is now a stock clerk at the wholesale produce market in Jack London Square; her mom, whose African American family had lived in Oakland for three generations already, worked as a human resources clerk at the Port of Oakland.As a 7th grader, Liberty was busy with school and enjoyed spending time with her friends; she was aware of the problems and challenges facing her community, as some of these shaped her life on a daily or even hourly basis. [Add a couple of details from WOSP or other available sources]
A couple of weeks after getting back to school from the New Year break, Liberty’s science teacher introduced a lesson plan that had not been on the calendar the previous month: “Our city needs your help…” Under the direction of her teacher and with a couple of surprise visits from the City traffic engineers, Liberty and her classmates used the Y-PLAN methodology... The map she made for “The Future of Smart” didn’t win her any prizes. This was the first time that Liberty thought of herself as something bigger than her family or circle of friends or basketball team. This was the first time she thought of herself as a member of her community...as a resident of the City of Oakland. And with that sense of membership or belonging came as sense of both rights and responsibilities….
How is the work and the details within the work organized? What is the significance of this organization?
Mayor Liberty Cheng’s State of the City Address may have the following organizations: Current > Past > Future.
Current: 2045
The effects of climate change are everywhere… [see Victoria Salinas’s contribution]. Describes everyday life in Oakland as it will be thirty years from now. Notes with prided that some of these things that she and everyone else now takes for granted only came about because of an open, collaborative effort led by then Mayor Libby Schaaf back in 2016.Past [Beyond Traffic]
2016 - 2020
Account of Smart Oakland initiative and resulting proposal; details of Oakland’s demonstration project: Crawl, Walk, Run.2020 - 2030
How Oakland’s DOT-funded demonstration went to scale, including the efficient replication of essential infrastructure-smart transportation technologies, Oakland’s ICT (Individual Cap & Trade), formation and early years of the TFoS (The Future of Smart, name of the benefit corporation owned by municipal corporations and dedicated to enabling smart-city-platforms), & Pandora 3.0 (Pandora’s curiosity finally led let it to decode and enable more than the music genome).2030 - 2045
Now we are cooking, but unfortunately in more ways than one: the effects of climate change are alerting every aspect of life; fortunately, cities have developed the capacity to both work together and find ways to adapt and overcome almost any challenge.Future
The Mayor closes with some forward looking statements--a little dystopic yet resolved to do more than simply survive. Because of the efforts and the vision of those who came before us, the City of Oakland, its constituents and its network of friends (others cities and strategic partners included) shall thrive.What determines our choice of details?
All the details of our story derive from:
- Observations and plans of the City of Oakland (documented)
- The actual results of the Smart Oakland initiative (e.g., “The Future of Smart” youth initiative)
- Big ideas from Smart Oakland initiative
- Specifics of our demonstration project (the proposed strategies making up the demonstration project)
- Qualified assumptions (the source documents behind the DOT’s Smart City Challenge, City of Oakland documents and other primary sources)
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