A Living Plan
Thursday, February 16 and Friday, 17, 2006
Many planners talk about how any plan needs to be a living document that changes as new information becomes available and circumstances change. The reality, however, is that one a plan is printed and bound it becomes a stagnant document which will require an update or total re-write at some point years into the future.
Typically, the FEMA Long Term Community Recovery Planning function has produced attractive, professional looking documents with many photos and renderings. This is a major expense. So the word has come down that there may not be a printed plan. Instead, efforts are being initiated to develop an internet based “planning tool.” It will be designed to capture all of the work we are doing and leave the LRA with a tool which will allow them to add projects as they are identified, update existing projects as new information becomes available, and tracking implementation of the projects. It will also allow people to look at projects for a given parish or instead look statewide for a specific sector like housing. Since it will be a web-based data base application, standardized formats for describing the projects that will make enforcing consistency much easier.
The hardest part is that they will be creating this application as we start to use it. No alpha or beta testing. Well, that is not 100% true since the results will not be accessible by the public until the plan is done.
Many planners talk about how any plan needs to be a living document that changes as new information becomes available and circumstances change. The reality, however, is that one a plan is printed and bound it becomes a stagnant document which will require an update or total re-write at some point years into the future.
Typically, the FEMA Long Term Community Recovery Planning function has produced attractive, professional looking documents with many photos and renderings. This is a major expense. So the word has come down that there may not be a printed plan. Instead, efforts are being initiated to develop an internet based “planning tool.” It will be designed to capture all of the work we are doing and leave the LRA with a tool which will allow them to add projects as they are identified, update existing projects as new information becomes available, and tracking implementation of the projects. It will also allow people to look at projects for a given parish or instead look statewide for a specific sector like housing. Since it will be a web-based data base application, standardized formats for describing the projects that will make enforcing consistency much easier.
The hardest part is that they will be creating this application as we start to use it. No alpha or beta testing. Well, that is not 100% true since the results will not be accessible by the public until the plan is done.
posted by J Corlss at 3:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home