Master Plan
Posted: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 12:45 am
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Updated: 11:37 pm, Mon Nov 12, 2012.
Daily Nebraskan
A new collaborative website launched last week allows students, faculty and staff at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to provide feedback and ideas about UNL’s Campus and Landscape Master Plans.
“We thought it would be a really neat way to elicit more input from the university as a whole,” said Jennifer Dam, assistant director of Campus Planning and Space Management.
The site, www.planbigideas.com, incorporates user-generated ideas along with concepts formulated by Sasaki Associates, Inc., the planning and design firm based in Watertown, Mass., selected to develop UNL’s master plan. Website visitors can review and comment on the concepts, make suggestions of their own and discuss ideas presented by other users.
UNL launched the campus and landscape master plan initiative in June 2012 to guide the university’s growth over the next 15 years and beyond. The master plan will address a number of planning issues including infrastructure evaluation and the analysis of existing campus space, according to the master plan website.
So far, 14 ideas have been posted to the site including suggestions like creating bike routes around campus that are separated from pedestrian walkways and putting up signs that mark the boundaries of UNL’s campus from each direction.
“The site provides an additional forum for people to give their opinion,” Dam said. “There are several really provocative ideas about campus on there right now, and it would be awesome if we could get a lot of feedback about those concepts.”
A post on the website titled ‘Giving Vine Street Character’ had the most interaction from users on Monday evening, with six ideas generated from that particular post. The idea with the most support involved a user’s opinion that the landscaping on City Campus needs to be improved so that it resembles the more extensive landscaping on east campus.
Dam said Sasaki Associates gathered initial information for the site using an online mapping tool that asked students, faculty and staff to track their usage of different parts of UNL’s campus on a daily basis.
“That was one of the reasons we chose the firm in the first place,” Dam said. “They were using this online mapping tool that we thought would work really well.”
The second part of the firm’s plan was to create the collaborative website to gather more feedback from students and faculty.
The site was created through MindMixer, a web-based program which hosts virtual town hall events that help encourage public engagement on community projects. Several UNL graduates are part of the group of founders who started MindMixer, which is based in Omaha.
Users on the site must register with a username and password to submit their ideas and comment on other content. Points are given every time a user interacts on the website, and the top users are listed on the homepage.
Dam said community feedback will be accepted in several phases during the development of UNL’s master plan as consultants from Sasaki Associates evaluate the responses and revise their ideas.
“It all depends on what feedback we get at this point,” she said. “As the master plan develops, the focus will shift to get more feedback on specific ideas.”
Representatives from Sasaki will host open house sessions about master plan concepts on Nov. 26 in the Nebraska Union and Nov. 27 in the Nebraska East Union. Both sessions will take place from 3:30 to 5 p.m.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2012 12:45 am.
Updated: 11:37 pm.
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