Parking Knowledge in the World

First off I want to thank John Van Horn, editor of Parking Today magazine, for including a link to my blog from his very own parking blog.

Yes, that's right.  He has a parking blog too.  I figured for sure I’d have the only parking blog out there for years to come and look at that... between February and March of 2005 the industry has gone from zero parking blogs to an incredible two!

John and I joined the parking industry at roughly the same time, about a decade ago.  I remember when Parking Today was just a fledgling magazine.  I wrote an e-mail letter to the editor stating how much I liked Parking Today because it was different from the other industry magazines.

In fact I wrote something to the effect that I liked the blatant self-promotion of Parking Today… the other industry magazines had self-promotion too but they tried unsuccessfully to mask it while John’s magazine not only embraced it, but actually wore it as a badge of honor.

John replied via e-mail that he wanted my permission to publish this comment in the Letters to the Editor.  I totally wimped out and declined.  I said I didn’t want to alienate the other parking magazines; after all, I was new to the parking industry and couldn’t afford to make enemies of the press so early in my parking career.

Oh, how things have changed.  I’m much less sensitive about such things today.

In fact, I hoped to share with you the actual content of that original e-mail exchange – except that I can’t find the darned thing. I searched for nearly two-and-a-half hours through old backup CDs, tapes and even (ack!) floppy disks.  I simply can’t find it <sigh>.  I need an index.  Perhaps, dear readers, John still has a copy of that e-mail somewhere and would be willing to share it with you instead.

Admittedly, I’m extremely disappointed that I couldn’t find those old messages.  I try to keep a copy of pretty much all the digital content I’ve produced or collected over the years.  I’ve lost more than a few items over time - but in general I save and backup everything regularly.  I’ve always subscribed to the theory that disk space is cheap so why not record it all just in case you might need it a decade later.

That's my personal stuff though.  It’s a different story for public information.  If you publish information to the Internet there’s a pretty good chance that it’s still lurking out there.

Public Internet data hardly ever goes away. This is a scary proposition; it should make you think twice about putting any content out into the public.

Case in point:  Search engines like Google keep plenty of historical records.  My first newsgroup posting on September 10, 1993 is still out there (check out Google's Twenty Years of Newsgroups if this type of stuff interests you).  Knowing that the information is out there in Newsgroups can be very helpful when seeking old information.

And even if Google decided to purge all of that old information you can never be 100% certain that some computer geek out there has saved the data straight from the search engine to his hard drive.

Most people and companies are awash in old data.  That’s why “Search” has become such a competitive business opportunity in today’s Information Era.  When you’ve got more data than you can handle but you’re unwilling or unable to discard it, then you need a mechanism in which to locate information quickly.  Whether it’s on your hard drive or on the Internet, searching for information has become big business.

Why do we save so many of these age-old documents?  I remember visiting a parking office not so long ago where permit application forms were stored in row upon row of filing cabinets:  applicants filled out forms in triplicate (no carbon required, fortunately) so that the applications could be filed by last name, permit number, and license plate.

Even if it was possible for somebody to remember all of this information, the fact is that we need a record of it.  You’ve got to keep copies, whether it’s for business purposes, personal use, or the government requiring you to keep it for seven years - you never know what information you might have to dig up later on.  So we keep all of it.  For a very long time.

Author Donald A. Norman wrote about The Psychology of Everyday Things (recently republished as The Design of Everyday Things) including what he called “knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world”.  Summarized, it means that some things you remember so that you can recall these things easily.  Other things you don’t remember because you can look up and retrieve whenever needed:  that is to say that the knowledge is not in your head, but it’s available in the world - if you can only find it.

(Incidentally, suppositions like this are in part why today’s education system encourages young students not to learn and memorize facts but rather to learn the ability to seek out the facts).

My old e-mail messages, a telephone directory, yesterday's newspaper, and those filing cabinets chock full o' paper permit applications are the equivalent of knowledge in the world; refered to only when needed.

The typical parking manager generally has lots of good parking knowledge in his or her head – especially information pertinent to his or her specific parking operation.  Other parking managers have information in their heads, pertinent to their parking operations.  Some of this knowledge overlaps, while some of it is unique.

Until only a few years ago the parking profession was completely dependent on knowledge in the head.  A dearth of published information about parking management and industry standards meant that you needed to have a good network of peers so that you could get knowledge from their heads.  Attending trade shows and conferences was critical to maintaining that knowledge network, getting knowledge in your own head, and finding out where to locate the other knowledge in the world.

That’s changing now.  A lot more knowledge is available in the world about parking management, thanks to published best practices in parking, training programs and useful content from parking organizations, online resources, professional consultants, books, magazines, and even blogs.

So it's becoming more important that the effective parking manager needs to know how to find these resources, rather than keep all the knowledge in one's own head.

One applied technology that helps maintain knowledge in the world is an e-mail listserv (cousin to the Internet newsgroups briefly mentioned above).  There are countless listservs out there, each on dedicated to various topics of discussion.

You may already be aware that even the parking industry has a listserv - it actually has several, but most are small or private.  This one is what I consider to be the granddaddy of parking listservs:  the campus parking list, or CPARK-L, with nearly 600 current members.

Doug Holmes and Pete Weiss (now retired) co-founded the CPARK-L listserv back in January 1993 with a goal of providing an e-mail forum for parking managers to share knowledge and information about parking management.  The general topic guideline includes any items of interest to parking managers, particularly those involved in campus parking management but, according to Doug “municipal and other parking professionals are ALWAYS welcome”.

Through e-mail exchange the CPARK-L is valuable for locating parking managers with knowledge in their heads.  But that's far from its true value proposition...

The unsung value of the CPARK-L, and probably the most under-utilized feature is the list archive, found at http://lists.psu.edu/archives/cpark-l.html.

These archives contain several years of historical content and messages that have been posted to the list.  And not only do the archives tell you what questions, answers and topics have previously been addressed but they also indicate who the knowledgeable parties are for those particular subjects based on who was posting the messages at that time.

Basically the CPARK-L archive is the parking manager’s index for seeking knowledge in the world.  You can sign up for the CPARK-L for free at the same web site.

(Incidentally, I’ve been a lurker on CPARK-L since 1996, following the conversations closely but only rarely posting messages.  Note that there are some basic rules of listserv etiquette required to participate:  no unsolicited advertising, no personal messages, and keep topics relevant to the membership of the list.)

So that’s about it for today's article.  When you started reading you may not have expected much  but look what you got:  all of the parking knowledge in the world.  Enjoy!  :-)

Comments

[Ray Famble]

We are putting together a position of parking manager here at Winston Salem State University. We would appreciate your input in terms of your job descriptions of the parking manager/director that you have.

Thanks

[JVH]

WOW -- Thanks for the blatant PR, Blake. We can use all we can get. Starting these things up is a task. And trying to have something on it every day is even more so.

As for the email - you have to be kidding -- I'm sure it was lost 27 disk crashes ago, before that little thing called "back up" was invented.

As for my age in the industry, you turn my head. Yes, we began PT 10 years ago, but I had 17 years before that slogging around the biz with a gate on my back trying to convince fellows like Doug Holmes and Robert Milner at U of M that they needed something new.

All the best, Blake...See the world doesn't come to an end when your heart is in the right place.

JVH

[Doug Holmes]

Wow. Even though Pete and I "invented" CPARK-L, I never really thought about it the way Blake described it above. I have had a ball running this list and have learned huge amounts from it through the tranferability, tete-a-tete (as it were), of the information and knowledge contained therein!

One thing that Blake does not mention is that there are many vendor/consultant vendors who also lurk on this list. Many of the ideas that are discussed on CPARK-L are picked up by the more aggressive makers of things we in the parking industry use and make it to the market place in one way or another.

CPARK-L was hatched by Pete and me in late 1992 and went online in early 1993. I hope that it will continue to provide information, knowledge and reality checks to the parking czars of the world for a long time to come.

Thanks, Blake, for the different perspective on my own brainchild.