There aren’t too many cities of this size that bring that much to government. In this context, I’m defining communities as a city of more that 420,000 residents. Many citizens here advocate in an informed way, rather than the reactionary, less thoughtful way that is often publicized. I’ve been really impressed by the amount of time that citizens in Raleigh spend understanding very technical and highly sophisticated issues. I think citizen participation is more unique in Raleigh than in general. Raleigh sets the example in terms of allowing citizen input-it’s part of our culture already because the government here is reflective of the community. This is evident in more of the complex stuff such as road projects, however, it varies across departments. There is an inverse correlation to citizen participation and the level of technical work with a government project. Is there more citizen input in Raleigh than other places?Ībsolutely. The challenge for open source is solving conflicting issues such as neighbors vs developers. Can you have an open process for an assisted living community in your neighborhood? Governments find it hard to embrace open source across the board when they know they’re going to get hammered by neighbors who are likely to take a NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) approach. We need to talk more about an open process as a means to creating a great city.īut there are a few things that represent a challenge. Governments have to connect the dots with the value of an open source process to what the community sees as success. If you just talk about the fact the City Plaza attracts over 100,000 people per year, people won’t think about the design and realize how important citizen input was to the outcome. We also need to link the process to the success of a public place or a facility. There are people like him that designed it because he was able to participate. Aly Khalifa at Design Box is not an urban designer or an engineer, but the City opened up the design process for the creation of the City Plaza. We have got to support and create processes that are open, but lead to tangible results by virtue of the open source way. How do we educate government and business leaders about the power of the open source way? We are inherently supportive of the open source way–confidentiality is just a small part, but necessary in this business. We are constantly talking about the products and sharing information. It’s crucial that they use an open source strategy so that the competition doesn’t say bad things about them. What economic developers worry about the most is a prospective client getting inaccurate information about their products (land sites, districts, etc.). The only time you have to do that is when the client talks about it or there is a closed session with city council to close a deal. Most peoples’ initial reaction would be that an economic developer has to keep information close to their chest. He also shares his experience with citizen participation and how he uses the open source way in his everyday life.ĭo you think most local leaders view open source as important to economic development? Why or Why not?
Now, David tells us how influential open source is to local leaders and how they educate government and business leaders about the power of open source.
In part one of our interview with David Diaz, president and CEO of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, we explored how open source is applied to economic development, how his organization works with local government, and the programs Downtown Raleigh Alliance has implemented. A continuation of David Diaz’ interview relating to Raleigh, NC and its efforts to implement open source technology.
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