Town square

A town square is an open public space commonly found in the heart of a traditional town used for community gatherings. Other names for town square are civic center, city square, urban square, market square, public square, piazza, plaza, and town green.

Most town squares are hardscapes suitable for open markets, music concerts, political rallies, and other events that require firm ground. Being centrally located, town squares are usually surrounded by small shops such as bakeries, meat markets, cheese stores, and clothing stores. At their center is often a fountain, well, monument, or statue. Many of those with fountains are actually called fountain square.

Urban planning

In urban planning, a city square or urban square is a planned open area in a city, usually or originally rectangular in shape.

Piazza (disambiguation)

Piazza may refer to

Cars

Companies

Events

Fiction

Music

People

Piazza (Q&A platform)

Piazza is a Q&A web service. It can be described as "mixture between a wiki and a forum" that can be used with learning management systems.

History

Pooja Sankar created the first prototype of Piazza in 2009. By February 2010, Piazza was used by approximately 600 Stanford students. In January 2011, Piazza opened to all institutions, reaching over 330 schools and tens of thousands of students by the summer of the same year.

While the service originally operated under the name 'Piazzza', in June 2011, the third 'z' was dropped from Piazza's name.

Funding

Service

Users can publicly (and anonymously, if the head instructor allows it) ask questions, answer questions, and post notes. Each question prompts a collective answer to which any user can contribute and an instructor answer, shown directly below, which can only be edited by instructors. Users are allowed to attach external files to posts, use LaTeX formatting, view a post's edit history, add follow-up questions, and receive email notifications when new content is added. The interface consists of a dynamic list of posts on the left side of the screen, a central panel for viewing and contributing to individual posts, and an upper bar for account control. According to the company's data, the average Piazza question is answered within 14 minutes.