As a techie turned urban planner (starting a PhD in the fall!) I am constantly amazed by the level of interest in urban planning issues that the tech community

As a techie turned urban planner (starting a PhD in the fall!) I am constantly amazed by the level of interest in urban planning issues that the tech community has. Within the ranks of practicing planners, I feel there is the oldish guard, who maybe groks a little GIS, but otherwise doesn't understand the democratic potential of data and information systems. Then there is the new insurgency of people who are "wizards" who come to the field with a high level of sophistication about coding, visualization, and analytics. To some of the older guard, these people are intimidating, because the new guard believes intuitively in open access to data through useful APIs, and repeatable analyses that consume the same data that everyone else gets. Contrast that with the clickety-click Excel/ESRI paradigm that we're waking up from. Data is "public" but not accessible. Analyses are performed by an expert who you simply have to trust that they did things right, because all you have is a finished map. I love the new direction that's coming in planning. In my city, we have a happy confluence of relatively sophisticated planners, a big tech scene, a lots of ped/bike/transit advocates, but there is still a gulf between what The People want in terms of data services, and what the various transit, city, MPO agencies have capacity to provide. This pre-coffee ramble is a long winded way of saying, "keep fighting the good fight, and doing cool and interesting stuff with urban data."