Earlier this year in March of 2009, HDR and the City of Omaha hosted a series of meetings to involve the community to get input for the new Downtown 30 Year Master Plan. It was a great idea, however not everyone could make it.

Beth Katz thought there could be another way for those people to give input that can’t make it to the meetings (prior engagements, work nights, night class, have kids, etc.).

So that following morning, we developed a quick website in time for the next meeting. This site offered the community a way to leave comments and watch the presentations as they’re happening or at a later date.

Over 200 people tuned in to watch the live video.
Over 300 people have watched the videos at a later date.
And 114 comments were left on the website.

Omaha World Herald did an article on what we had done.
(Check out the photo! Perhaps it should have been a photo of Beth Katz or the website, but I like that they used a photo of our penguin. ha!)

Our hope was to help the city utilize technology and design as a way to be more inclusive and have more community members involved.

And they have!

Beth Katz, Craig Moody and I met with Jed Moulton (Manager of Urban Design) and Steve Jensen (Director of City Planning) from the city to talk more about the next steps.

Since then, we helped Environment Omaha set up a Ustream account and they streamed a presentation live for people that couldn’t make it.

And last night was the Presentation of the Master Plan, and the city had set up their own website with a public forum and streamed the meeting live.

Yay!