Leisure time competition
going to the park is a Leisure Time activity. Parks have to compete with other Leisure Time activities for your time
A while back I was visiting Manhattan's Union Square Park , I talked to a youth there who told me, “there's benches for the seniors and a playground for the little kids but nothing for us.”
Most of the parks in my neighborhood offer 3 activities benches, a playground and sometimes a basketball court. this is a total of three activities.
Let's compare the available activities in parks to those available on your television screen
and then there's YouTube which offers over 800 million free videos
“Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”
Henry Ford
in general Parks give you three choices, television millions of choices. people have chosen television over parks with their leisure time dollars and the average American spends over 90% of their time indoors
Intelligent systems
on demand video content dividers have created intelligence systems to offer their viewers programming choices that they would be interested in.
Libraries constantly add new books to meet the needs of their patrons
in the city where I live the Parks Department builds or renovates a park and then often doesn't make any changes to it for decades. Unlike libraries and video providers parks are static an unintelligent and do not change to meet the needs of their patrons except over very long terms
.....
is this website going to get lot more people to spend more time Outdoors? I think not. but what it is is a starting point for parks department to build upon with a goal of adding intelligence to parks to start creating Smarter parks that can learn ways to get more people to want to spend time Outdoors