Friday Chat Sessions

[Ryan A. Waggoner]

We’ll be starting up the weekly chat sessions again each Friday at 9 a.m. PST.  Please offer some discussions that you would like brought up, and we’ll see you there!

[landplanner]

Look at the “Are you working or not ” discussion thread and personally contribute and update it. From an employment perspective, let people know how your thriving and/or surviving in the worst economic downturn so far in our lifetime (unless your over 80 years old).Give us some perspective as to what the economic trends and conditions are in your area/region/ corner of this country, any insights as to hiring patterns of other design firms and what your coping strategies are to get through all of this and onto the other side of daylight.

I absolutely promise a summary this month of all the entries and contributions to this discussion thread to date. I will intermingle it with other bits of data, anecdotal information and insights and reports from the various design frontiers about the very topics mentioned above. It should provide for an interesting comparison and contrast., Of equal importance will be to forward this relatively “unscientific” survey and its conclusions to the appropriate contacts at ASLA to get their reaction and even though incredibly late to this dismal party, what our leadership intends to do about the issues identified in the survey.

Your thoughts and continued contributions, please.

[Adam Trujillo]

any topics for tomorrow morning? it would be interesting to see what designers, landscape architects and firms have been doing to market themselves in this new economic limbo.

[landplanner]

Ye. the first response to this chat session should be our first topic.

[Ryan A. Waggoner]

i definitely look forward to the outcome of the survey. when and how are you planning on putting it together?

[Matt Schelly]

Has anyone found some good webinars or video pieces about village and small town design/planning?

[Matt Schelly]

I am in the public sector (community planner for a county) and we have had a hiring and wage freeze for two years. We might get a 2% increase for 2011. We have lost, through attrition, about 15% of our workforce (20% of our planners, including management). Our work assignments have shifted to more planning and fewer project reviews. So, the workload of each person is higher than before and we get no overtime to compensate. I hope we will be able to begin filing our vacancies starting in the new year (unfreeze), but that looks doubtful. The public sector held out longer at the beginning of the crash, so we are likley to recover later, too. Maybe in 2012?

[Joe Collins, RLA-Land Planner]

How about a discussion on the history of our profession and its early pioneers. Ive been re-reading Design on the Land, so its a current interest.

[Matt Schelly]

I’ve been slowly reading Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, I skipped the “at sea” portion and I am only up to page 92., but it quite fascinating to hear Olmsted describe the English landscape as he first observes it and then knowing what he achieves later in his life. It is available in full view on Google Books.

[Matt Schelly]

By the way, for those of you who may not know (I didn’t), Olmsted, the son of a Connecticut merchant, dropped out of college (supposedly due to sumac poisining) and his father bought him a farm on Staten Island in 1848. He had previously been employed as a seaman, merchant, and still as a journalist, which apperantly led to his 1850 trip to England. I find this interesting because a lot of the descriptions in Walks are about farming and the English people he runs into are surprised to find an American farmer so civilized. At that time, they apparently thought we were barbarous savages or something like that. His mere visit changed some people’s view of America. His descriptions are very detailed and, as you can imagine, picturesque. Most interesting to me are his descriptions of the English rural and town landscape.

[Matt Schelly]

Oh, I wanted to add that our attrition was a combination of retirements (which usually meant managment or upper levels), one new child (we do not allow part-time or remote-access employment), one firing (due to some unrevealed severe infraction), and people hired away into new jobs elsewhere (these were interesting to me since it meant some companies were still hiring planners while we were freezing hiring).

[Steve Mercer]

I don’t wish you any bad luck but anytime we can reduce Planning and Zoining’s work force that is a great thing!
These organizations have gotten way to big fer their britches. Maybe if they lose and additional 30% of their staff they will get down to a size where the people who are left will only have time to concentrate on what is truly important and all the other nit picky stuff will be left alone.

[Rick Kingsbury]

The ASLA intends to do nothing. The ASLA response will be somewhere along the lines of “It is up to every landscape architect to promote the profession, not the job of ASLA” or “ASLA is all of us, we can’t rely on the leadership to do the work of promoting the profession” or “get involved in your local chapter, that is the way to promote the profession” There is some truth of course to all of this, but we have leadership for a reason! (to lead) .

[Joe Collins, RLA-Land Planner]

Through previous posts and reading, this topic has been on going since the birth of the profession. I do rely on ASLA to advocate the profession, but I also take advantage of opportunities to advertise Landscape Architecture. Everytime I am at a seminar, meeting with civil engineers or architects, I proudly announce and advertise my title. My point being that the advocacy is a team approach beginning with its practioneers and the national society. Our efforts will be rewarded through a dual approach.

[Ryan A. Waggoner]

cool idea joe, one that i’m sure alot of people would love…

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