Advocates Try to Make Cycling in D.C. Less Black and White: DCist.
A photo montage of our journey. Click to enlarge
I was really delighted to see this article in DCist. It’s about Black Women Bike DC (@BWBDC), which has been around since 2011.
I/we didn’t know about Black Women Bike DC when we did our Walk With a Doc in Ward 8 – See:”Photo Friday: What a difference open data plus 5 miles makes in understanding people’s health choices: Capital Bikeshare” and Wards 6 and 5, which was stimuulated by what Kait Roe (@kaitbr) and I read about disparities in bike use in Washington, DC.
Veronica Davis founded Black Women Bike DC and was honored by the White House as a Champion for Change this year.
Since this is a blog about writing what I learn every day, I learned that
- Open data can drive curiosity and change, but they can’t do the changing
- Things are happening though – a good check on doing something new is to find out what’s already going on
- As a friend of mine recently said to me about the work he’s doing, “It’s just community building 101, Ted”
So…from focusing on individual choices to looking at the environment that shape the choices. From apps as the answer to community building.
Which really brings me back to Susannah Fox’s (@susannahfox) recommendation to me that Diana Forsythe’s article “New Bottles, Old Wine: Hidden Cultural Assumptions in a Computerized Explanation System for Migraine Sufferers” be inscribed on cubicle walls. That was in 2008, before there really were mobile apps.
But it’s really the same stuff.