Visions of London

This is a simple image generator to help Londoners share their Vision for London, Ontario.

Create Vision Statement

Features

  • suggested vision statements as reported from council meeting
  • custom vision statements
  • various preset images of London
  • use your own image
  • publicly accessible url for vision statements using preset images
  • ability to customize header and footer

About The Project

I was following Megan Stacey’s Twitter coverage for the London Free Press. The next day, I started working on this new plugin. It was this invitation from our mayor that was the deciding factor.

Our Mayor, Hon. Ed Holder, seems to be daring Londoners to respond. Unwilling to pare down even council’s ideas, he hungrily demands more ideas from the public.

Is it too much, too many ideas?

Ed Holder, mayor of London, Ontario

Council decided it was not. They also decided that they want our feedback. After writing your councilor, why not turn this ridiculous situation into an hilarious one.

About The Images

Creating a new Vision Statement is pretty easy. You can use the images supplied or use your own. Find an image that means London to you.

Most of the images were obtained from public domain. Some I took myself. The last three are from news publications The London Free Press, CBC London and the Toronto Star.

If you use your own image, you will not be able to use the publicly accessible share link. However, you can right-click on the image and share it using social media or other services

Examples

Here are a few examples.

Share your love for London with beautiful scenes and inspiring messages
Customize the message and image to make something uniquely London
Highlight the incongruity between council’s vision for London and the reality faced by citizens

The Council Meeting

Recently, the newly elected councilors and mayor took part in an exercise developing a Vision Statement for the City of London. The councilors spent the evening working in groups on a vision statement. Each group had their own style and approach.

The councilors were not in agreement with how to proceed after the exercise. The mayor and most councilors wanted to publish the results and gather feedback from the public. Some councilors believed that the results weren’t ready to ask for public opinion. Our mayor Ed Holder was confident that they were suitable for feedback.

London Free Press reporter Megan Stacey was live-tweeting the meeting.

Apparently, the debate took a strange turn. Debating about debating. About debating. Turtles all the way down.

Megan Stacey followed up with this short article in the Freeps.

The City of London quickly followed up with pushing their questionnaire on their official website. I looked at it briefly and they did appear to keep the vision statements in their raw format. I have to commend them for doing this quickly but I honestly think there are far more important issues that our council could be addressing.

Thankfully, some councilors disagree with the mayor and majority. Disagreement is an important part of democracy, and in this case, I agree with their disagreement. My favourite form of disagreement is through humour, and my favourite tool to solve any problem is software. So, I built this image generator. I took extra time to make it as customizable as possible. I hope you have fun using it.

Create Vision Statement