Since we first launched the Public Life Data Protocol Version 1.0, in October of 2017, we’ve been thrilled to see numerous municipal partners, private practices, nonprofit app developers, and public space advocates all adopting the Protocol for their work. From new open-source digital tools to large-scale data collection efforts by cities and partners around the globe, we want to share a few of the most impressive examples from the first year in the life of the Protocol, along with our upcoming plans to make the Protocol easier to use and contribute to.
For the uninitiated: the Protocol is an open standard for what we call “public life data.” It was developed in collaboration with our partners at Gehl, San Francisco Planning, Seattle Department of Transportation, and the Municipality of Copenhagen. The Protocol outlines a common language for collecting information about people spending time in and moving through public spaces such as parks, plazas, sidewalks, and streets. This is anonymous, aggregate data that can give us a better sense of how people currently use a space and how design or programming interventions might improve it.
The Protocol offers specific categories for stationary activity (like sitting, performing, eating), mobility (walking, pushing a stroller, using a wheelchair), perceived age (25-44, 45-64, 65+), and more. By providing metrics that can be used in different “public life studies,” the Protocol allows datasets to be more scalable and comparable across neighborhoods and cities. It also makes developing digital tools for public life data collection significantly easier. Altogether, the Protocol can inspire innovation that significantly lowers the barriers to entry for conducting public life studies that can positively impact the public realm of cities.
What follows are some of the exciting Protocol projects from the past year and a half.
To start, we’re happy to announce the launch of CommonSpace, an open-source app for public life studies developed by Sidewalk Labs. CommonSpace makes it easy to set up your survey of a public space, for volunteers to enter data on people moving or stationary activity at the site, and then to download and share the data once the survey is completed. As demonstrated from the diagram below, the app significantly speeds up the process of a typical public life study with pen-and-paper tools and, as a smartphone app, makes participating in a public life study more intuitive and accessible.
The tool was first tested with the Park People, a Canadian parks advocacy nonprofit, in collaboration with the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee. The latter group used a CommonSpace prototype to evaluate the impact of a cafe, new seating, and market programming in their local park. Volunteers studied the site, then participated in a “community data workshop” to look over their data and generate stories about the public life of the park.
Are you interested in testing the CommonSpace app or building on its open-source code? Here’s more information on the purpose of the app, along with information about its launch on GitHub. You can also read more about the Thorncliffe Park study here.
This past summer, Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) collected information on the use of streets and sidewalks across 108 block faces in 38 neighborhoods. This study was the first step of using the Protocol as an authoritative standard for the department’s data collection. According to SDOT, the Protocol provided clear descriptions for the eight field staff on how the data should be recorded, thereby increasing the reliability of the data and reducing potential bias. The results of the study have been released in Protocol format through the city’s open data portal online for anyone to download.
By creating an interactive dashboard, SDOT hopes to engage the public in understanding, exploring, and valuing data on how streets are used by people outside of their cars. Moving forward, it hopes that the Protocol will enable more cross-city and cross-region comparisons, as well as empower communities to take up the studies themselves--developing their own research questions--instead of relying only on outside experts or city staff.
We’re also thrilled to be building community around the Protocol. Last spring, we organized We Count! Public Life Data Design Sprint, bringing together civic technologists, urban designers, software engineers, and others to experiment with the standard and dream up future tools for planning studies, recording data, and sharing study results.
Some of the winning proposals included mock-ups for:
- A “public life needs assessment tool,” where users can take a quiz about their research interests, and are then directed to specific data fields in the Protocol, along with survey tools, to help them execute a public life study.
- A mobile data collection and input tool that makes it easier for anyone to enter their public life data with simple dropdown menus, a modular data entry process, and autofill functions in relation to time, date, and weather
- An assisted-vision data collection app that captures an image of a place, identifies what’s there, shares the images with human users who can correct errors, then deletes the image to protect privacy
- A stationary activity mapping app that enables users to playfully create a visual diary of a space using emojis
- A database and platform for academics, designers, and community members to upload and share reports, public life data, and scholarly articles, helping one another formulate research questions and answer them
You can learn more about We Count! by checking out the event website.
We’re learning about new Protocol-related tools and studies all the time. The design firm Mithun has conducted a public life study of the shared spaces around a public housing development in Colorado. The makers of CounterPoint, a transportation planning and measurement smartphone app with more than 2,200 count locations and 2,300 users in over 75 countries, are building out a stationary activity mapping function. In Mexico, dérive LAB has translated the pen-and-paper tools to Spanish, while in Germany, researchers at HafenCity University Hamburg are creating a tool to detect stationary activity in images of public spaces.
All of this is quite exciting, but we recognize that we can still do a lot more to make the Protocol accessible to more people. We’re thrilled to have launched a GitHub repository for the Protocol, which we hope will inspire more community around the standard and make the governance process more transparent. We’re also hoping to form an ethics committee to set parameters for how public life data is collected, shared, and acted upon. With more participation, we believe the Protocol will become more useful in shaping cities for the better.