A screenshot of a draft of the License to Inspect tool, built by Azavea for PlanPhilly using the new L&I app. Click to enlarge.

A feature story covering the as-yet unreleased Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections API-based online tool ‘License to Inspect,’ its inspiration and hope was published on Technically Philly Monday, a story I reported and wrote during the last couple months.

It is the last major feature of the Transparencity grant project I’ve been leading, and one of the more detailed investigative reports I’ve done in my journalism career. The feature, which details the nearly two-year struggle to go public with a project with internal support, is meant to show the lessons learned and obstacles faced in the hopes that future city agencies can more efficiently release their data publicly for development and citizen use.

Give it a read, for lessons to be taken for any local government. and then find some of what didn’t make it into the piece below.

Below, portions of my reporting and writing that didn’t make it into the final feature:

• Focusing the effort on getting data out the right way was important for a few reasons, Burns, the L&I commissioner, said: (1) transparency, (2) reducing staff work load on freedom of information requests and (3) “We want to show that the Licenses and Inspections Department is an integral part of the community, by being able to show just how much we do with a small staff and (4) how much this department has improved in recent years, battling its reputation.
• Lessons learned: have high-level requirements, spend time on meeting them, but set deadlines and stick to them, develop that sense of urgency as it exists in every private workplace.
• “What Nutter needs to say when people ask about, say, the property tax delinquency problem is, ‘We’re going to fix that by getting all of our records straight and public and transparent,” Cheetham said. “When we do that, we’re going to realize problems we didn’t know we had. No city agencies are cross referenced. BRT data was the best the city had but it can be flawed. The way to make this real is to get this sense that the only way to truly fix problems, like property taxes, is to get all our records publicly shared in a format that can be used, like we’re finally seeing done with L&I.”
• “If this is viewed as successful, this will shine a lot of good light on taking more time to build a services API. In city government, we immediately default to do a data dump, which means we need to find the fields and each project we’ll do a new one. With five new projects, that’s five new data dumps we have to manage. If we can scale off an API, we only have to regularly maintain that one service.”

The story did well in traffic for a boring data story, featuring a few hundred hits in the first few hours and getting spread and discussed on social media, even receiving a Facebook Like from, yes, the Mayor, despite the story's tough talk.

• “Sometimes it might seem like an API is more of a challenge, but even data sets can present problems with maintenance. This was a chance to connect with Open 311 and make things easier for the future,” said Clinton Johnson.
• “But the city shuts down over the Christmas holiday. No changes to the city’s servers or services during any extended break when a lot of core staff are around to avoid any big problem. So for a good chunk of December, nothing can happen, like launching and running an API,” said Cheetham.
• By July and August 2010, Cheetham says, “everyone was asking the right questions still, from database specifications to field details to data accuracy assessments.”
• Burns and Gupta made clear immediately that they didn’t have the capacity on their own to provide a live data feed, “so they were going to release data as a daily text file export that would get emailed, received and processed to be loaded for release to the public by geo-tagging each record and standardizing them all,” he said. “Everyone involved was moving forward with great enthusiasm and support, without any adversarial in-fighting at all.”
• “By September 2010, everything was green lighted. Azavea is building the application, and we’re already planning to roll it out in the next few weeks,” Golas said. “But then we just suddenly felt the sea change at the city level.”
• “Allan [Frank] saw DOT as the natural gatekeeper for the [L&I] project, and it takes time to take something like that over,” says another developer close to a stakeholder.
• “Data has to be accurate because people will be drawing conclusions from it,” Burns said.
• “DOT said they’re into this, we could have something done by end of September. We get a specification draft in October, a word document of ‘this is what it’s going to look like,” said Cheetham. They sent a sample of the API, a single data field, and we just had to ask for more. It was just this incremental change. And then, well, in December, the city locks down changes to its systems right before elections and during major vacation time, particularly for effects to the mainframe. It’s about keeping everything secure and stable when people are away. So we get into December when they finish the next draft, but we have to wait until after the holiday lock down. We talked about January 7 as the date, and we got a data stream as planned around then. They asked for feedback, we gave it, we started using it and building the application around it. We found issues in the data and limitations in fields, including that a number of the fields agreed upon by PlanPhilly and L&I were not in there. They said ‘they weren’t in the spec,’ but they were in the spec, so DOT went back to add to that. So then a new development process starts. They’re going to redevelop this with expanded fields. L&I would check in once a week for the status, and we’d get news that the specification is 50 percent revised, now 75 revised, the application is 10 percent done, now 20 percent done. We got another version of the API in July. We turned around a response in 24 hours saying here are the eight things that are still buggy. They’ve acknowledged those problems and that’s where we are.
• The data appears to be rather accurate, which is always a concern with city records: “we aren’t ground trooping it, but it makes sense and we have faith in it,” says Cheetham, no stranger to data sources. Some batch uploads and a handful of minor inconsistencies exist but “nothing to call this project into question,” he adds.
• “We had more than a few meetings with L&I early on. Those centered on what information do we want in this application and Azavea saying this is how it would work with these data sets, who would be responsible for any liability, what could be done with the data once it was released, all those specifics,” Golas said. “The technology solution was simple early on, getting a daily data dump of all the fields we requested that were entered into the L&I database system, called Hansen.

How large technology companies still lead innovation in the world is the focus of a freelance story I wrote for Temple Review, the alumni magazine of Temple University.

Read the story here or download the PDF here, on page 24.

An earlier nut graf: Innovation has been seen as strictly in the purview of tiny, agile startups, taking an idea and bringing it to market. But as the speed of new technologies continues to quicken, the need for large businesses to help bring products to market becomes even greater. So big corporations are not only playing a remarkably underplayed role in innovation, they are also innovating in how they change the world altogether.

Give it a read and then check some of the extras from my interviews that didn’t make it into the piece.

Munir Mandviwalla

• Founding chairman of Fox’s Management InformationSystems Department
• ‘Small businesses may be the inventor or the conceiver or even who brings that innovation to the initial market, but you really need the larger firm to actually see these innovations through
• LiquidHub is also a company that is letting IT lead. Campbell’s is heavily outsourced IT, while Merck has very high internal IT, but both focused on innovation.
• “We have this herd mentality of chasing the next great startup that will save the world,” Munir says. “We just believe it’s true, but we need a network of big players to make it happen globally.”
• “In corporate culture of the 80s and 90s, you’d say, ‘if you buy IBM, you cannot get fired,’ because there was such a movement with conservatism and IBM was that safe choice that would work and was no risk and did not really show innovation.
• “Really, the largest part of success with innovation in technology has to do with standardization. When there is too much standardization, you find new innovation, but to really grow that innovation to start, a company needs distribution power that startups or other small companies just don’t have.
• “There is a fortuitous relationship between small and large firms. Large firms have these tools to create success and small firms don’t have much to lose so they will bring new products, but in technology, they usually cannot grow themselves. They have to die or be acquired or have their idea stolen altogether, for it to really succeed.”
• Using the technology of Mosaic, a University of Illinois project that is called the first popular graphical web browser, Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and began packaging it with its Windows operating system. “Without Microsoft, the Internet and the browser would not be as ubiquitous as it is today. Despite the power of that technology, it took the explosion of what became a large company to truly spread that innovation to non-technical types.”
• “Cisco really did most of its innovation through acquisition.
• “But now, innovation is a hot word for old boring corporate America, and they’re serious about it because if they think it’s just a fad, they’ll never survive.”
• “A lot of companies want to sit on their asses, and wait for good things to come around. During the financial boom, it was much easier to finance innovation acquisition.”
• “You look at the creation of the Internet and find large, somewhat bureaucratic organizations really fuel that innovation, something like HTTP protocol needed to come from a force that was something like a large company to create standardization.”

EDWARD QUINN

• “It’s always interesting to make something from nothing. The larger companies provide a platform for when that technology becomes adopted.”
• “When you look at how quickly the country adopted radio, then TV, then the internet and now social networking, you see the role for the big company to provide market acceptance or infrastructure for all of those.”
• “We’ve had products sit in our vault and now we want to just take the intellectual property and package a solution when it fits a demand.”
• “Microsoft is moving to a cloud model. If you’re a big software company, you have to wondering how do you charge. The business models of the last five years are going to change like they did before then. We have to be excited to take risk.”
• “Big companies are becoming more flexible because they have to be.

LEONARDO MATTIAZZI

• Mattiazzi, who relocated to King of Prussia in 2006 to launch Ci&T’s North American headquarters,
• Leonardo Mattiazzi, ’09, VP of International Business at Ci&T, helped oversee the product get to market. 37 [Feb. 8, 1974], 14 years with Ci&T, moved from Brazil in 2006. summer 2009 MBA graduate
• Ci&T has 1,100 employees but now 35 percent of revenue comes from North America. It’s a progressive, young company that relies mostly on a client basis of big corporations. It’s core business is developing tools and applications for large companies, like Johnson and Johnson and Coca Cola.
• “People focus on smaller startups because it’s sexier. It’s that simple. People love the idea of an entrepreneur taking an idea and creating something new. It’s a story worth telling. Everyone wants that person to be successful, we can relate to that as an individual.”
• Also, when you’re a smaller company, you’re usually identified with one product, so it’s easier for people to identify with your innovation. Walk into a supermarket and you’ll find Johnson and Johnson products everywhere, with innovation behind many of them, but it doesn’t feel innovative.
• “In order to really disrupt the market, an established company needs to take precautions because it’s often not beneficial to their core business. Their resources are assigned to their primary businesses, not creating new ones. Something new needing investment and resources is very tricky.”
• It’s somewhat slower pace of things because these big companies need to get their returns.
• These companies can also create things that are disruptive, but it’s difficult because it’s dangerous to what they have established.
• Big companies have more resources, more experiences and they have a process in place to get to market. You may be very bright but some things require a lot of equipment or expertise or direction. One thing is for sure, innovating requires a lot of trial and error and a smaller company or individual may not be able to experiment in the way a bigger partner can.”
• “A technology startup today is very inexpensive, creating an online product or a mobile app is very cheap today. There is the cloud, open source software, not much need for infrastructure.
  It can happen very quick, but not everything is online or a mobile device. When you look at physical products, like GE or Johnson and Johnson, things that need to be manufctured involves cost. Bigger companies are better prepared than some.
• “I think we’ll see a lot more small companies coming up in new places. There will always be big companies doing innovation, one way or another. Today it’s really expensive technology startup and this happens cheaper and cheaper. The barriers are lower, and they will be even lower in the future. that helps us as individuals.
• “Innovation has been centered in particular places, like the United States, a center of technology and other innovation, particularly in Silicon Valley and happening in other places, like Boston, D.C. and Philly. Now that other countries are becoming more and more important in the world economy, you’ll see this huge population that will have access to what they didn’t have in the past.
• Other countries that are becoming more important in the world economy, well, historically, they had a lack of capital, so people came to the U.S. Now these other countries are developing their own capital markets. It’s a huge opportunity for investors in the U.S., Europe and Japan to work with new places. It’ll be more decentralized.
• I don’t think that means that China will be the center of innovation. I think it’ll be across the world in lots of different places, and large companies have global experience. If a big company can apply ideas across borders, be a ‘cross-pollinator of innovation,’ well, they’ll do well.
• P&G has created products for rural China and India. Who else can do that? Not many smaller companies, when it comes to research, design and distribution.
• It’s one thing to distribute your new improved detergent in the U.S. through Wal-Mart and Target when they are a few blocks apart, but someplace in China, there not might be a paved road. What do you do then?
• How did Fox prepare you for your work? Other than the beer Happy Hours?
• “I had a lot of practical learning, but I needed the theoretical foundation for my work. Fox offers a lot of both.”
• Below check the preview of the Runens mobile app from Ci&T I mentioned in my lede and read from one of the developers or the TechCrunch coverage.

• I put roughly an hour and half for email, nearly that long for interviews, three hours for notes and a first draft and a bit more than an hour for finalizing, with another hour for filling new paperwork.

Though I took part in three of 14 JLab-funded Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Fund projects, first announced here last fall, I led one of them.

For Northeast Philadelphia hyperlocal NEast Philly, I helped lead the editorial direction of a project called District 172: the politics of change after state Rep. John Perzel.

• http://neastphilly.com/john-perzel/

Following the indicted former state Speaker of the House, whose corruption trial has been postponed until the fall, we covered what the impact the loss of a 30-year state leader would be on his district, particularly a small swath that had served as his political base.

Find all the coverage here.

I had the following roles:

• Reported two feature stories, including the final piece on how community building in Mayfair and elsewhere may be undergoing a sea change, and a second piece on the touchy subject of redistricting and Perzel, in addition to some smaller items.
• I interviewed Perzel’s replacement, Democrat Kevin Boyle, his staff and had Perzel fail to respond to comment following repeated attempts through his attorney.
• I spoke to more than a half dozen neighborhood leaders and others with perspective on the matter.
• With NEast Philly founder Shannon McDonald, I helped carve out the editorial direction and direct the Temple University Philadelphia Neighborhoods interns, who were our partnering organization.
• I designed the District 172 branding.
• I developed a layout for the District 172 landing page and worked with Frankford Gazette co-founder Jimmy Smiley to publish it.
• I gave copy and content to Smiley for our Players and Timeline section, two more interactive tools on the page.

To kick off this year, we at Technically Philly ran a weekly Tuesday feature interviewing a technology community member and/or entrepreneur who left Philadelphia. It is called Exit Interview and the weekly portion of the series is winding down, with perhaps one more to run next week.

The three of us who founded TP love Philadelphia, in particular its creative and entrepreneur communities. Journalism aside, we tend to think those whom we cover are going to be a big part of improving Philadelphia, its perception, its government, its taxes and its reputation.

Journalism should uncover truths and push forward dialogue. That can come with important public affairs coverage and institutional oversight, but it can also by highlighting key issues among its audience.

So I felt strongly that to further the conversation among these communities, it was our role to face directly concerns holding it back. To do so, I led the move to bring together nearly a dozen interviews and will now roll back out Exit Interview when new perception comes forward.

Today, on the Technically Media blog, I shared six lessons I took from running the series.

To get a quick sense, here are three example headlines from the series:

• Ben Kessler: Philly has “a lack of leaders looking to take the risk to start a company”
• Megan Wendell: “I felt that Philadelphia taxes were significantly holding back” our business
• Notehall on Philly perception: ‘To be honest, generally, it’s not very good’

Four years later, I’m finishing this piece of archiving business.

A couple months ago, I announced I had moved my honors thesis to a subdomain of this site for the sake of organization and archiving. Following up on that resolution to make more tidy a rambling online portfolio, I have brought another dated, collection of work of which I am proud under this house.

I spent the better chunk of 2006 in Tokyo video podcasting, writing, traveling and learning on behalf of NBC Universal Digital Studios. Now all of that work can be found at japan.christopherwink.com.

See all the Episodes here and all the Archives here. Go and explore.

A few things interested me from my work in 2006:

• Short, bad titles — The post headlines were all short and sometimes not even descriptive. I didn’t recognize then the importance.
• I wrote a lot — I far outpaced all of my fellow castmembers in output, which is great, but I could have made much of the content terser and more straightforward.
• I actually had comments — On many posts, I had a handful of comments. I haven’t transferred them… yet.
• I never linked – I didn’t have a single link to a past post.
• Photo albums, not in posts – Photos and the video episodes were never embedded. This is the one major change I’ve made, by incorporating them.
• Yes, I called posts ‘blogs’ — But that was 2006. What’s the excuse today?
• I learned and experienced so damn much — I interacted with an audience and explored and created multimedia, but ultimately, I was just a young kid learning. ..And what a clear stepping stone toward the WDSTL podcast I did while in Western Europe.

The interview was due to run in the Metro but never did. With a year passed and its hook gone, I run it here for all you grammar geeks because there just might be interest in hearing the thoughts of someone who told me: “I also love the semicolon, but that’s just my personal preference.”

Find what I submitted below.

The 125th annual convention of the Modern Language Association [came] to the Pennsylvania Convention Center from Dec. 27 to 30 [2009]. Metro speaks to Rosemary Feal, the executive director of the 30,000-member association for scholars of language and literature.

What can we expect out of an MLA conference?
A lot of professors speaking about literature, psalm, poems, TV shows and all the things that our professors teach in class.  We have sessions on the literary history of Philadelphia, sessions on the future of education. We’ll also have film showings and authors reading from their work. You can also expect eight or 9,000 of us invading all the the wonderful restaurants in Philadelphia.

Why have the MLA conference in Philly?
We ask for bids, but we’re a very big convention, so we need a convention center and the hotels that can support us. Philadelphia is one of those cities that can do it. In the past decade, we’ve been there three times. It’s located right on the northeast corridor, by New York and D.C. Plus, people like to bring their families along, and Philadelphia offers great culture. Everybody finds the city easy to get around, exciting, safe, fascinating, and near to enough of our members that people can come from a lot of nearby cities.

What are you most excited about?
I’m most excited about the convention’s focus on translation. Maybe it doesn’t excite you, but it excites me. Think of all the stuff you read from other languages. You can only do that because of the work from bright people everywhere. We’re bringing in experts from around the world to talk about that impact. That’s exciting to me.

Anyone who has done an academic paper knows MLA works cited style. What do you like most about MLA over competitor Chicago style?
MLA style uses parenthetical references, and I love parenthetical references. If I’m quoting the Declaration of Independence, I don’t have to use footnotes. No footnotes. Parentheses are the way to go.

More than a year ago, I handled a half dozen interviews and a couple rewrites on a story for the Inquirer that covered what Philadelphia workplaces will look like in the future. As is sometimes the case, it never found its home in print.

The story’s primary timeliness has been lost, but I think it still has merit. So, with permission from my editor, I share it below, in addition to a slew of extras from the heavy lifting of reporting.

It was meant to be a localized version of a Time magazine cover story that caught my attention.

Below, read the story, see portions of my interviews that didn’t make it into the piece and watch some related video news pieces

*Please note that the facts, figures, quotations and assertions are fact-checked and correct as of June 2009.

THE FUTURE OF THE PHILADELPHIA WORK PLACE

Not that long ago, there was something of a stable existence in retail.

Sheldon Abba

Sheldon Abba worked in a variety of clothing stores, from independent storefronts to big players like Urban Outfitters. He had a marketing and design background and, he thought, a fairly good sense of his future.

And then the bottom fell out.

With the economy on the slide, he was let go from Walnut Street-retailer Stussy in February, and his perception of that future changed.

“When I was in school, I thought I’d get a steady job with a brand and get a regular paycheck,” Abba, 23, said. “When that job evaporated, I started thinking differently. Maybe I could pay bills doing something like it on my own.”

So, with a handful of friends, he launched S. Industries, an ethereal design and retail company that is based wherever Abba and his cohorts are at the moment. He’s finding steady work through word of mouth but will soon take the venture on the Web through an e-commerce site. It’s a far ride from clocking in as a retail day manager.

The U.S. recession has changed lots of plans, like Abba’s. While entrepreneurs, freelancers and telecommuters have long been part of the U.S. workforce, today’s economic climate seems to have put more people in those roles than in recent memory. So much so that some say independent, remote ventures like Abba’s S. Industries are part of a trend for the future of the nation’s workplace.

That trend may fast become a norm in Philadelphia and across the country in the next five years or more, said Thomas Malone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor and author of the 2004 book, The Future of Work. Those who do stick to cubicle life may find their offices becoming smaller, closer to home, more mobile and, believe it or not, more fun in coming years, other experts say — all thanks to advances in communication technologies and increasingly casual work environments.

“The key message here is that I think we are in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in work, and it just might be as important a change for business as democracy was for government,” Malone said.

Some worry that the expected continued decline in traditional office employees could leave the new worker short on camaraderie and political social skills.

To curb his isolation, though, Abba has launched his venture with friends. They hold their meetings in bedrooms with a computer and a hard drive, listening to music and laughing.

“That’s a different work environment than any work place,” Abba says. “What I’m doing — finding work and making a schedule — is really valuable learning.”

For those who work from home for established companies, there’s another trend in keeping the best of the office: co-working.

For more than four years, Lori Hylan-Cho worked for software companies in California from 2,800 miles away in her Logan Square home near the Philadelphia Art Museum. The software developer and mom, whose hair is not unknown to be dyed purple on occasion, relished the flexibility but lamented the solitude.

“I was going a little nutty,” she said.

So, after making “a New Year’s resolution to get out of the house,” Hylan-Cho rented out space at Independents Hall, a shared office in Old City that rents workplaces to self-employed or other independent workers.

“In the coming years, the place becomes less important than the tools, and managers become more comfortable with distribution,” said Alex Hillman, a freelance Web developer who in 2006 opened Indy Hall with University of the Arts professor Geoff DiMassi. “Companies that want to stay ahead of the curve — if they’re open-minded — will need to explore these options in the traditional worker-employer relationship.”

Hylan-Cho, 40, has worked in software development for 11 years and has watched more and more of her co-workers flee the office.

“Working from home let me put in a load of laundry, be home for packages and sometimes meet the kids for lunch,” she said. She kept in touch with work by way of regular video conferences and instant messaging, connecting with co-workers from California to Texas back to Philadelphia.

That extra freedom kept her loyal, one of the more valuable assets of an employee in the future.

“Businesses are quickly finding that one of the most expensive costs of business is turnover,” said Deanna Geddes, an assistant professor of human resource management at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. So, the Center City office of the future may increasingly be a more inviting place.

Geddes says we might see the rise of the campus workplace for those who, unlike Abba and Hylan-Cho, do stay in the office.

“What successful businesses like Google learned before a lot of others is that people like to hang out, where they can develop friends, and when you have friendships in the workplace, people want to stay,” she said. “The casual campus environment that is more open, with fewer doors and walls, more communal space, games and less restrictive hours, lets people come and go as they please and keeps them invested in the workplace.”

For those who have already left traditional work environments, voluntarily or because of a tightened economy, the recession seems to point work places in a new direction.

“It takes a special kind of person, someone who can separate time and get work done,” Abba said. “That isn’t everyone, but clearly even the old-style offices of the past are going to change.”

-30-

Professor Thomas Malone, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• “We’ll see the economic benefits of very large business, as the same time as the human benefit of very small organizations, the freedom and creativity.”
• “The reason, of course, is a completely new generation of technologies that are reducing the cost of communication to such a low level. A huge number of people can now make sensible decisions for themselves with access to enough information because of the Internet, instead of just following orders.
• “We’ll see more human freedom, more people making more decisions for themselves. We may see more small organizations, where you’re your own boss.”
• A lot of lessons about that future can be taken from the nation’s largest private employer and an online auction behemoth, Malone said. Increasingly, we won’t need or always be able to find a company to employ us.
  “The clerk in Walmart and that seller for eBay represent the difference in what is now and what may come: in how they work, in responsibilities and where and when they have to do them,” Malone said. “Seven hundred thousand people say they make their primary or secondary living on eBay. They are essentially independent store owners with a huge amount of freedom in what they do, what to sell and what prices to set. That’s the future.”
• “Even inside big companies, we’ll see more freedom inside the company, more command and control to coordinate and cultivate. In another meaning of freedom, there will be more choice of when or where they work, with telecommuting for example, we’ll see a decentralization of the workplace. Both of those results are enabled by cheap communication….
• One reason cities grew the way they did was that for many occupations you had to live in a city, near the office to the company you worked for. One of the important trends changed by cheap communication technology is that more and more kinds of work can be done essentially anywhere in the world. What that means, I think, is that people will choose where they live often for reasons other than where their company is because it won’t matter. What that means is the dynamics of cities, i think will change. There are a lot of nice things about living in cities other than just going to work there. So, some people will continue to want to work in cities even though their jobs don’t require them to do so. It’s hard to know what the net impact on a city like Philadelphia will be, but I expect the population of cities may lessen but that the quality of living will go up.
• “The key point is electronic communication is reducing the need to travel to work everyday. You can work at home or near home much of the time. Ten years ago, we used to think that more and more people would become telecommuters. I think that’s not nearly so black and white now. The vast majority of professionals will be telecommuters in the sense that they work some of the time from home or while traveling and surely the professionals who spend all the time working from the office are a minority, but we’ll see a hybrid of office and telecommuting time.
• “If you need an example of a future employee, look at an eBay seller. If those 700,000 people were employees, it would make eBay the second-largest private employer in the country, second only behind Walmart. Of course, they are not employees… That’s all the freedom of any small store owner. It’s on a scale unlike ever before, in any regional or global marketplace. It’s as if an auction company built a retailer — not eBay the company, but eBay the community.
• “In cities, there is a pretty strong division between business and residential neighborhoods. Maybe we’ll see more of a blurring of these distinctions,” Malone, the MIT professor, said. “I think when people don’t have to drive or commute all the way to a downtown of a city, that means they could stay at home. We’ll see more of something I call a neighborhood office building.”It would be a place, Malone said, where telecommuters and freelancers, whose numbers are expected to rise, can work together. It’s a trend called co-working that already has strong roots in Philadelphia.
• ; residential neighborhoods with one or two or more office floors

Professor, Deanna Geddes, human resource management at Temple’s Fox School of Business

• This is a time to play to our strengths as a region. research and biotech, biomedic
• Companies without the sophisticated IT for corporate to retain employees may suffer.
• We might see more choice, allowing younger people to come in at 10 a.m. and work through 8 or stay on to 9.
• Center City could become the place for more campus-orientated workplaces. It’s cheaper to build out of the existing city.
• Taking a mantra from education in 1990s, clicks not bricks. We don’t need all the institutions.
• Work flexibility will be key.
• More and more employees are looking for flexibility. work-life issues and boredom go even further.
• There’s nothing more valuable than a good idea.
• More people want a job that first their lifestyle,  not just someplace to punch a time card.”
• “There will always be a place for corporate headquarters. They may change, get smaller and more casual, but they won’t go away entirely.”
• “There will always be a place for the cubicle jungle,” Geddes, the Temple professor, said. “But we won’t go as much and might not have to travel as far.”

Web designer Alex Hillman, co-founder of Independents Hall

• “What happens when a company is based outside the city, and the employee lives outside the city, but they come to the city to work in a physical space, like a coffee shop or sitting in a park using Wi Fi?” Place starts to breakdown.
• “The risk is low, as it’s a fairly cheap big city. There are a lot of industries and for so long Philly has just been a good place to try new things. It’s in our city’s history.”
• “With some trust for telecommuting or greater freedom and be valuable to the long-term relationship.
• “People react to distractions differently, but ultimately being completely isolated can’t be healthy,” said Hillman. “A combination of factors affect the distribution of the workplace.”
• In 2006, Alex Hillman, a freelance Web developer who caught cabin fever from too many lonely work sessions at home, and Geoff DiMassi, a University of the Arts professor, opened Indy Hall.
• See Technically Philly coverage of Alex Hillman.

Software engineer Lori Hylan-Cho, telecommuter and Indy Hall member

• 
• “Ditching the commute is a big thing. It’s not just that you’re stuck in traffic or on a train, but you’re not with a family. could productive worrk time, but not family time.”
• It was awesome. But it puts a strain on communication. You have to be a very active communicator. You have to make sure you’re around.”
• “I’m used to working with a lot of men, certainly in technical positions,” she said.
• The worst recession in a generation or more has brought on a slew of attention to the future of business and our friendly workplace confines. In the view of some experts, the Web-literate telecommuter is a sign of things to come.
• It’s invaluable for life balance, as you have kids, your job can be more portable giving you a chance to be with your family.”
• “It was a great way to have a job that I love and live where I want to live,” Hylan-Cho, 40, said.
• So, if Hylan-Cho lands another gig that brings her to an office, she might meet with colleagues there for regular meetings, if not traditional full days. Still, she said it’ll be hard to give up the flexibility she’s had for the past few years.
• But, she now no longer telecommutes for that California company. In fact, she says she might look for another chance at the collaboration of a traditional office.
• “I don’t know if it’s the future,” Hylan-Cho said. “But it’s worked well for me.”

Helpful U.S. Census Bureau of Labor Statistics information for Philadelphia employment:

• BLS Mid-Atlantic Information Office
• Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), 2008-09 Edition
• Employment Projections
• Regional Employment and Unemployment News
• Regional Employment Statistical Data
• Pennsylvania County Employment and Wages presser

Phil Pappas, of West Frankford Town Watch, investigating an alarm near Comly and Bustleton on early Saturday morning July 10. Click to enlarge. It's my photo.

Earlier this month, I went on a ride-along with the West Frankford Town Watch in lower Northeast Philadelphia. For the love of hyperlocal journalism and community coverage, I put together a 2,500 word profile of the organization, with a handful of photos of mine. It was good to remember that I got into this whole scene for a love of writing. Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Mike Mawson smells something.

It’s past midnight on Comly Street near Bustleton in Mayfair. The sun went down hours ago, but forgot to take this sticky July heat with it. Mawson is riding shotgun in the sensible four-door sedan that his partner Phil Pappas drives. The West Frankford Town Watch patrol was circling around to head back south of Cheltenham Avenue to drive the streets of its namesake neighborhood when Mawson caught a whiff of something off in the still nighttime air.

“It smells like something is burning,” confirms soft-featured Pappas, 53, sitting upright with two hands on the steering wheel and dressed with purpose in matching earthtones. “I’ll pull over.” MORE

Read the rest of it here.

Two pieces I wrote for NEast Philly made their way into yesterday’s Metro Northeast Philadelphia edition.

First, as depicted above, a piece on Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams’s presentation at the Northwood Civic Association meeting during which he again outlined the four main objectives of his nascent administration.

Second, as depicted below, my coverage of the second meeting of Northeast Philadelphia Now, a fledgling attempt to coalesce various neighborhood groups to fight back against quality of life crimes plauging that part of the city.

In both cases, I was due a byline but something want awry in the production — which also resulted in the wrong NEast branding. But then, I suppose it’s still the beginning of the partnership between the hyperlocal news site and the city’s most circulated daily newspaper.

I certainly hope the paper is giving the niche site the respect it deserves, a fear others have recently had with other papers.

Check yesterday’s issue here, from pages 15-22. The issue runs every other Wednesday.

The cover of a regional edition of the highest circulated daily newspaper in Philadelphia featured a news story of my own yesterday.

Rumors on the possible sale of an alleged drug-infested nuisance property veiled as a recovery home in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood that came out of last week’s Frankford Civic Association meeting was enough to warrant front page coverage of Metro. The property has been seen as something of a rallying call on the issue of illegal ‘recovery homes.’

I attended the meeting as a former resident and occasional contributor to NEast Philly, the Northeast hyperlocal, that started last month a content partnership with the Philadelphia edition of the international free daily newspaper franchise.

NEast Philly Editor Shannon McDonald says she entered the agreement, which features repackaged NEast content every other Wednesday, for the branding and larger distribution. Metro, which currently only pays McDonald for a feature Northeast freelance piece that usually leads the package, gets cheap content for a niche geographic readership for whom it can sell more direct advertising.

But it’s part of a growing direction for the scrappy free daily, which is likely more respected in Philadelphia than in its other U.S. markets of Boston and New York City but still takes heat for its short form, image and graphic driven product.

Since announcing the deal on April 29, Metro also has a partnership with noted cityblog Philebrity.com, which offers highlighted nightlife listings for the coming weekend, and has an agreement with election news blog pa2010 and the Philadelphia Business Journal.

It goes beyond Philadelphia.

As eMedia Vitals reported, like the Northeast for Philadelphia, the New York paper rolled out a Queens edition and uses Mashable content on Thursdays. The Canadian arm partnered with FourSquare.

The free daily is leveraging independent publishers who want to grow their reach and hit print readers to get free or low cost content and those communities and niches. It’s an angle that print isn’t dead — it just needs some cost cutting and realignment.

It seems like a brilliant strategy in my estimation.