Contact Info
The Wise City — my urban consulting practice
Follow me on Twitter @danlatorre
Email me, dan@tint.org
PGP public key
PGP fingerprint: F0CB A7E9 D3CF E5BD 377C E746 5D7B 3663 C1D0 00C2
Mini-bio
Daniel Latorre is a cultural technologist, a strategic change agent and team builder. He’s an 18 year professional digital media practitioner who’s been on the Net since 1990 and on the Web since Mosaic’s birth in 1993.
Raised in Bogotá, San Diego, and Minneapolis by Colombian & Norwegian-American parents. Mentored by an Anthropologist. Relaxed New Yorker. Third Culture Kid. Toasts cheers, salud, and skål often.
Ex-CKSGroup-Razorfish-FunnyGarbage-RockstarGames-McCann, and other places. Now focused on the civic realm, previously at Scholastic doing educational technology, at OpenPlans doing online civic engagement and civic media, and at Project for Public Spaces as VP for the Digital Placemaking program he started there. He is currently working on The Wise City, a civic digital strategy consulting practice he started in 2012.
Notable highlights:
- Co-founder of the McGolrick Park Neighborhood Alliance in 2014, a local public space advocacy volunteer group in my Brooklyn neighborhood. With pressure and advocacy tactics we helped raise $1.3M in public funds for our underserved park space within our first 10 months.
- Creator of the first adaptation of Ushahidi for the urban planning context while creating the Digital Placemaking program at Project for Public Spaces in 2010 — an example of digital adaptive reuse of open source software for open source placemaking and urban design, acknowledging & incorporating innovations from the “global south” for inequities all too present in the “global north.”
- Instigator of the #bikenyc Twitter hashtag in 2009 — fostering peer to peer community self organizing; as of April 2013 a monthly Reach of 3.4 million, and 8.8 million Timeline deliveries.
- Creator of Fixcity.org for transalt.org and Open Plans — a new human-centered approach to service design and crowdsourcing for public input, demonstrated with a beta app for citizens’ requests for bicycle racks. The outcome of this 2009 work rebooted Open Plans’ focus on community mapping apps.
- Creator of Scholastic Teacher Share in 2008 the first K-12 Open Educational Resources site (with support from the Hewlett Foundation) — increasing peer to peer teacher collaboration & Creative Commons licensing for 2.2 million teachers.
Past volunteer projects:
- harveysarles.com — creator, admin, editor, & photo editor of my mentor/teacher’s site
- The Illuminator – founding member of this mobile arts/activism collective (video from our kickstarter)
- Occupy Town Square – founding member of this local public space & community organizing affinity group
- whOWNSpace — founding member of this radical urbanism collaboratory
Posts Elsewhere
- Creating a “manifesto” for the Tech for Engagement community, Knight Foundation
- Digital Placemaking – Authentic Civic Engagement, Project for Public Spaces
Project Related Press
- Is City Building an Art or a Science? by Dean Saitta, Intercultural Urbanism
- Contest offers cash prizes for making better public spaces in Miami by Andres Viglucci, Miami Herald
- How Participatory Budgeting Is Transforming the Way New York Funds Neighborhood Projects by Joe Maniscalco, TechPresident
- Technology is for People: Outlining Four Freedoms for the 21st Century by Brendan Crain, Project for Public Spaces
- The Urbanite’s Guide to Surviving Climate Change by Erin Hoekstra, The Society Pages
- Radical culture: playing the future to guide the present by Canan Marasligil, Guardian Professional
- Legal or Not, ‘Occupy’ Movement Comes to Fort Greene Park on Sunday by Kyle Thomas McGovern, New York Times
- Mapping the Future of San Antonio’s Downtown, Digitally by Project for Public Spaces
- #whOWNSpace: Observe, Diagram, Intervene by Domus
- Meet the Helpsters by Justin Richards, New York Press
Published Work
Writing:
“Digital Placemaking After 6 Years: Defining An Emerging Practice” in Media Architecture Compendium: Digital Placemaking. avedition, 2017
“Corredor Verde Voces de Cali” text in English about my exhibit on a civic engagement project in Cali, Colombia.
Andel, Jaroslav, ed. Modes of Democracy. Prague: DOX, 2014.
Photography:
“Medellín: Santo Domingo metro cable station library.” 2011. JPEG.
in “Metro Libraries” text by Ana Lucía González Ibáñez.
Green, Jared. Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World. Princeton Architectural Press, 2015.
“NYC Rally for Egyptian Democracy Protestors.” 2011. JPEG.
in “Activists and Activism, Digital” by David B. Tindall and Tracy Groenewegen.
Harvey, Kerric. Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics. SAGE Publications, 2014.
About this site’s name
This personal domain has seen many versions but the spirit remains the same. In the early days of blogging I wanted a place to reflect and refract notes about Net culture, and on April 7th 1999 these liner notes from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports came to mind:
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.