Urban advocate, writer, and Next American City editor Diana Lind spoke with us today about “Disrupting the Status Quo: Opportunities for Sustainability”. She gave us a clear 3-part framework in which to think about the major challenges to urban sustainability, and illustrated them with vivid examples, comparisons, and stories.

Below are my visual notes, and above is a map highlighting park deserts (more than 10 minutes’ walk from a park or recreation center) from Philadelphia’s Green2015: An Action Plan for the First 500 Acres.

In a morning devoid of paperwork and red tape, Tim O’Reilly (former board member and now a sort of fairy godfather to CfA), led us in a discussion about what good open software looks like. The fascinating tension and balance between breadth and depth will, I’m sure, surface repeatedly. Should we invest time into a robust platform, or a quick and discrete feature improvement? Run an analysis to support an important policy citizens won’t see until 2016, or make it painless for any neighborhood to get a block party permit next summer?

I suspect the ideal alternates between the two zoom levels, with one informing the other. What do you think?

A little reading before the first day. Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice by Daniel Lathrop and Lauren Ruma.

Broad similarities highlighted the more quotidian (and, in my book, more delightful) differences. Two of my favorite browsing spots were bookshops in Susannah’s neighborhood. Books are more expensive in Australia (by 27% compared to US), which the Sydney Morning Herald attributes to a variety of reasons including higher printing and shipping costs, the inefficiencies of a smaller market, and Australian publishing being owned by high-overhead, debt-laden multinational conglomerates.

At the same time, perhaps some of the cost is returned to the reader. Both shops held an air of being well and truly curated. And the Potts Point Bookshop — the size of a Manhattan studio apartment — publishes this short but rich guide every season. Here are just a few of its dozen or so pages:

Summer reading guide. November is summer! “…Thank our loyal customers… entice new friends… and of course, we would love to help you in person at the bookshop!”

Short summaries are great for picking gifts or piquing your interest. And yes, that’s $33.00 for a paperback.

This is the propeller hat that everyone received on their first day. We had to wear them to a company-wide happy hour that Friday and introduce ourselves. A couple of months ago, I sent this email:

Hi everyone,

I’m writing to let you know that I am leaving Google at the end of November. The past few years through Ads, Docs, Flu Trends, Maps, and more (not to mention UX team dodgeball and septabike rides) have been an incredible journey, and it’s no easy decision to tear myself away from this community and, dare I say it, family. This is a company that adds extra zeros to any target number, turns outlandish jokes into useful launches, maps the moon, and elevates everything from CSS classnames to tech support to cafeteria lunch into an art form.

But it’s precisely these experiences at Google that have made me impatient with the way the world works, and I’m hungry to bring our spirit to the wider world. I’ll be spending 2012 creating reusable, open-source civic technology as a Code for America fellow.

Thank you all so much. Please don’t be strangers.

— Mosh