Placemaking through community and adaptable design (The Case of Coffee Park) (First Design Iteration).

Using participatory planning and community design methodologies (i.e. open planning, pattern language design, placemaking, community planning charrettes, planning-in-situ and wikiplanning) this project explores solutions to revitalize Coffee Park -- a small park along the CN railway in West Montreal. This is a complex site that shows issues of unsafety, lack of mobility and sense of place. The objective of this project is to integrate the park to its larger urban context to improve the mobility, safety and overall quality of life in this public space. After a series of visioning workshops, brainstorming sessions, two community planning charrettes and an open planning exercise, this project incorporates inputs from stakeholders, students and ordinary citizens into a collaborative urban design project. The project proposes strategies of urban re-stitching and regeneration through adaptable design and open community planning. With the objective of encouraging future adaptations and transformations, this project is published under a Creative Commons license. Adopt and adapt these ideas (but cite and acknowledge accordingly)

Leveraging Blockchain Technology to Break the Cloud Computing Market Monopoly

Cloud computing offerings traditionally originate from a handful of large and well established providers, which monopolize the market, preventing small players and individuals from having a share. As a result, the few, blindly and perforce trusted entities define the prices and manage to gain a significant competitive advantage by exploiting the knowledge derived by users’ data and computations. To tackle this monopoly and empower the democratization and full decentralization of the cloud computing market, we present CloudAgora, a platform that enables any potential resource provider, ranging from individuals to large companies, to monetize idle resources competing on equal terms, and allows any cloud consumer to enjoy access to low-cost storage and computation without having to trust any central authority. The key enabler of the platform is Blockchain technology, which is used to record commitment policies through the use of smart contracts, publicly verify off-chain services, both storage and computation related, and trigger automatic micropayments. On one hand, cloud consumers have the chance to request storage or compute resources, upload data, and outsource task processing over remote, fully distributed infrastructures. Although such infrastructures cannot be a priori trusted, CloudAgora offers mechanisms to ensure the verifiable validity of the outsourced storage and computation, discourage potential providers from behaving maliciously, and incentivize participants to play fair. On the other hand, providers are able to participate in auctions, placing bids for storage or computation tasks, serve requests, and offer validity proofs upon request. Our prototype is built as a Dapp on top of Ethereum and is available as an open source project