DIYcity Main Group

Hello everyone out there in DIYcity! Apologies for the silence here for the past two months - I've been hard at work at what I've long been calling "DIYcity part 2". And that is finally live, in alpha, today. But the surprise is it's not DIYcity. It's a brand-new site, Appify.com.

How did that happen?

Well, Danny Shapiro, Aditya Chada and I were working on revamping DIYcity, and the idea kept evolving, getting better, getting bigger, and at a certain point it became clear that this was no longer DIYcity but something entirely new.

At that point, we shelved the DIYcity framework and started running with the new one. The result is Appify. Here is an excerpt from a note I've sent around to a few mail lists this morning:

I'm excited to share with you a new site, launching today, that is all about local apps - *your* local apps.

It's about getting those apps discovered, and used, by everyone in your community. It's about learning exactly what the people around you want in the way of apps to make their communities work better. And it's about seeing what other areas have in the way of local and civic apps that your own local area could use as well.

The site is called Appify, and it's launching today in a "developer's alpha". We're looking for EVERYONE who has built a local app, on any platform, to come to the site, input their app (takes 30 seconds) check out the site, and give us feedback.

So - Appify is live, sort of, (alpha version for now, full version coming in January).

If you have a local app that you've built, please add it to Appify today.

If you have friends who have built local apps, please forward this post to them.

Please also follow us on twitter.com/appify.

And please read our blog at http://blog.appify.com.

So, if Appify is not DIYcity 2.0, what happens to DIYcity? I'll save that for another post - and since DIYcity has always been community-driven, it will be something I'll expect everyone to weigh in on.

For now - please check out Appify and let us know what you think!

Hello all of you out there on DIYcity. It's been a long time since I've written in, and I just wanted to give a quick update on things.

First: progress on the new site is speeding along, though predictably taking ten times longer than expected. The idea has evolved and evolved into something very new and different, and I think exciting. It feels like we're in the home stretch toward a launch now, but one never knows for sure.

Then: wow, the world really is changing fast, isn't it? It has been almost exactly one year since DIYcity was launched, and in that time we've seen DC, San Francisco, NYC, Vancouver and Toronto all open up data sets for their cities. I've talked with tech people in other cities who say they're preparing to go down the same road. I think we can expect things to start moving even faster in the next year. (Really makes the case for a new version of DIYcity, no?)

Here are a few events coming up in the next month around open data sets, in various cities around the world:

A NYC Open311 Dev Camp October 24th

A Toronto Open Data Lab November 2

A San Francisco Open Data Event on November 7.

That's a very partial list, just culled from things I'm planning to (hopefully) attend. If you know of other events I've missed, feel free to post them here.

Some other links here, to things I've written around the web lately:

- How Long is Your City's Tail? on O'Reilly Radar.

- Getting Beyond Hyperlocal on Urban Omnibus.

Finally: apologies for all of the spam that was going out on DIYcity until recently. I think the site somehow became the target of a massive, global spam network. I've clamped down on the freewheelin' anyone-can-post-at-any-time nature of DIYcity for a bit, until it calms down, then will hopefully remove the clamps again once the coast is clear.

That's all for now. More to come...

Reposted announcement from Philip Ashlock, The Open Planning Project:

I'd like to invite you to take part in the initiative to bring cities together in the pursuit of sharing technology and standards for 311 services. Please forward this to other interested parties.

http://open311.org/2009/09/announcing-open311-devcamp/

To attend or see the current list of attendees including other cities: http://open311.eventbrite.com/ (So far the 311 teams from NYC, D.C., Toronto, Columbus, and other cities are attending)

On October 24th, The Open Planning Project will host Open311 DevCamp at their NYC office. Please register to attend either in person or remotely via Eventbrite (it’s free). This is a DevCamp style un-conference to coordinate a standard specification for 311 services. Washington D.C’s 311 API will be a major case-study for developing a more universal 311 API. In general, this DevCamp will be an opportunity to discuss and develop what’s needed to make 311 services more accessible and for cities to share knowledge for mutual benefit. The event is intended for developers, project managers, and policy makers involved with 311 services. We encourage those involved with 311 services from all cities to take part. If you cannot attend in person, please sign up as a remote attendee and we’ll provide you with information about how to connect to the DevCamp remotely.

Please register at http://open311.eventbrite.com
The wiki page for the event is http://wiki.open311.org/Open311DevCamp

Ultimately this conversation will lead to a standard specification for 311 services, but the very first goal is to create an environment for knowledge-sharing and best practices.

On the same day there will another event in NYC that focuses on coordinating open technology for mobile devices and we plan to coordinate with that event as well: http://openmobilecamp.eventbrite.com/

I hope you can be involved or can forward this to the most relevant person in your city. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Philip Ashlock
--

Philip Ashlock
The Open Planning Project - http://www.openplans.org
phil@openplans.org | @philipashlock | (360) 389-2741

Hi all,
I just recently discovered DIYcity and am fascinated by the forward-thinking nature of this endeavor. As a planner and web developer it's right up my alley.

We have recently been kicking around some ideas about how to truly mobilize Twitter, to use it outside, on streets, in parks and in venues - accessible for anyone, not just the Twitter "elite". Beyond some of the obvious uses of Twitter, it's a great exchange format, merging information from both humans and machines in a very straightforward way.
Anyways, I don't want to go into much detail, since that's probably all old news for everyone here. We have put together a prototype that basically allows anyone to request the most recent tweets and link to more via text message. It works for both, Twitter accounts and hashtags, and anyone can post to hashtags via text message, if they are not on Twitter. In addition, we're playing with various sticker formats, to encourage interaction outside, on site. And that's where DIYcity comes in.
We'd love to brainstorm and test some use cases and some of the ideas discussed here seem perfect. As a start, some of our ideas include:

- Mobile dialogue in parks, squares, etc.: Use a hashtag as "discussion forum", to post safety issues ("6'5, bald guy with green shirt just stole my purse"), to fun stuff ("Need 2 more players for our volleyball game, come to xyz"), weather alerts, lost and found, etc.
- Mobilize announcements from delays, to parking spots (http://twitter.com/BoulderParking), to city infos (http://twitter.com/iknowdenver) and make them accessible beyond Twitter's user base.
- More advanced concepts of the mobile city (http://www.planetizen.com/node/39717)... again, going beyond the Twitter user base.
As I said, we have a prototype to play with at http://GuerrillaTweets.com and would love to get feedback, discuss the concept and assumptions and hopefully get some of you interested to play with it or collaborate.

Cheers,
Chris

http://eParticipation.com
http://twitter.com/challer

The new DIYcity is finally underway, being constructed and on the road to launch. It's a great feeling after so much time spent considering approaches, assembling team members, etc., to see things actually being built.

Now we just have to build it, launch it, and hope that it's the right answer to the challenges facing everyone out there trying to make cities and communities work better.

I think it is.

As we get closer to launch, I'll start to unveil the new idea a bit more, talk about the insights and factors that have led to this change in the site, and introduce some of the new team members so that they can begin to have a presence on the site.

Until then, please continue to enjoy the site as it is!

DIYcity is looking to talk with government CIOs and tech teams from cities everywhere.

As the age of open civic data gets underway, what are your needs, your challenges, your hopes, your uncertainties? How can non-governmental, public-facing organizations like DIYcity assist you in achieving your goals? What can you learn from our past year's experience of engaging city residents on the issue of civic software? And what can we learn from you, to make our site serve your community better?

We're having conversations with tech teams from cities around the world right now about these things, and we'd love to talk to you, too.

Contact us at diy@diycity.org and just say hi to get started.

Somehow a month has slipped by since my last post to DIYcity, and looking over the site it feels as though it could as easily have been a few years.

One thing is clear: it's time for a revised version of DIYcity. Not just a touchup, but a total revamp, a re-imagning of the site, one that holds true to the idea of creating Do-It-Yourself Cities everywhere, but that is more in step with where things are at the moment.

Luckily, that's exactly what we're working on.

It has taken me longer than expected to get this going. I've been putting together a team (more on that later). I've been talking with advisors. I've been talking with city CIOs. I've been weighing different ideas for implementation against each other.

In the meantime the field has continued to grow and evolve, and I think that evolution, and the evolution of ideas for DIYcity, are going to meet up and the results will be great. It's what an investor of ours at Outside.in once called "skating to where the puck is going to be".

So hang in there for a few more weeks. Please excuse the random foreign-language spammer who occasionally slips through the cracks to send out link-bait to everyone. We're on our way, we have one or two more hurdles to cross, and then it's a straight shot to a new DIYcity.

In the meantime, enjoy your summer.

Also, if you're interested you can follow me on O'Reilly Radar and on Huffington Post (and soon on NYFI...)

Hi DIYcity

The City of SF has undertaken an experiment to develop an open source platform with the community that will help improve public access to raw government data in machine readable formats. We see a great opportunity to work with other cities and developers in creating technology that is re-usable, free and open source to solve a common challenge. As members of DIYcity, this might be of interest.

You can learn more at our wiki and if you’re technically inclined check out our documentation. Our next open meeting is 7/2 @17:00 PDT dial in: 219-509-8111 [252380#]

http://apps.sfgov.org/opendata
http://apps.sfgov.org/opendata/index.php/Documentation

Jay Nath
jay [dot] nath (at)sfgov[dot]org

Hi all,

Come join us for a meetup to solicit ideas, interest, participants and planners in the upcoming Breakout! Festival on July 1 at 6:45pm at New Work City (200 Varick Street, Suite 507b).

This summer the BREAKOUT! Festival will return creative work to the
streets of New York. Using coworking as a model, and injecting
lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban
public spaces, BREAKOUT! will explore new and productive niches for
working outside of traditional office buildings. BREAKOUT! seeks to
create a new architecture for the creative city by appropriating
public spaces for the collaborative knowledge work that drives the
contemporary city.

This meetup gathers together fans, volunteers, and planners interested
in helping make outdoor coworking and the BREAKOUT! Festival a
success.

The Agenda? Discuss:
* the upcoming New York Festival (September 18th - October 30th)
* ideas for facilitating breakout sessions
* cool things needed for breakouts
* how to participate in a breakout
* how to do more

Please RSVP here:
http://www.meetup.com/BreakoutNow/calendar/10729904/

Website: http://www.breakoutfestival.org/

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Elysse

If you've been following the posts on DIYcity, you may have sensed recently that we've been in a sort of holding pattern. Launches of a couple of products in the spring and a flurry of activity around various ideas were followed by questions of how to make all of this work worthwhile to the people doing it, and how to sustain that work once people's initial enthusiasm for it has leveled off. As this happened production on DIYcity came to a standstill, and the site has been functioning as a sort of bulletin board for announcements about DIY-type developments ever since.

While this has gone on, I've been thinking and thinking about what shape DIYcity should take in order to address those questions of making work worthwhile and keeping the work going. I've been bouncing ideas and questions off of my growing list of brilliant advisors. I've been thinking about what the next stage of DIYcity is going to be, exactly.

With help from those advisors, I've finally got the plan. And it's good. It's exciting. I think it could become the most interesting thing I've ever worked on.

So the plan is there, ready to go. There are just a few (financial) matters to attend to before we can put it into action.

I'm going to start preparing for this new phase of DIYcity immediately behind the scenes, and just figure that the still-open stuff will work itself out by the time I'm done preparing. Then we'll get on to that next stage for DIYcity.

Until then, there may be a bit more of a holding pattern. We'll try to make that as interesting as possible for everyone, and hopefully it wont last too long.

I've been watching the discussion trying to figure out the DIY City's wavelength.

I think part of what we see emerging on the local (neighborhood) Issues Forums hosted by E-Democracy.Org fit your model of citizen problem-solving. My experience is that at the very very very local level people will pick shovels and do stuff, while up the chain people prefer their tax dollars to do the work so they don't have to be bothered.

On my local neighborhood Issues Forum - http://e-democracy.org/se - we've had people start community garden efforts, ask if people want to do a blood drive and then promote it, suggest and then organize a volunteer lake clean-up (only to run into trouble getting connected to the right person in the parks department for permission), buy flower bulbs in bulk for their homes with some left over for public space, etc. Recently, a mugging at a new local light rail stop generated a flurry of activity: http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/355

Anyway, since a number of you will be at Participation Camp, I thought I should say hello. If any of you would like to talk neighborhoods online to gather tips from 15 years on the front lines of e-participation, check out the two sessions I'll be leading or virtually note - http://e-democracy.org/if - for an existing Webinar and some links here: http://pages.e-democracy.org/Social_media_in_local_public_life

Cheers,
Steven Clift
http://stevenclift.com - A personal intro
Executive Director, E-Democracy.Org
http://twitter.com/democracy

I'm on vacation this week and only on the web here and there, so my posts to DIYcity will be slim for the next few days. I wanted to post a link to this, though, a post I wrote yesterday for O'Reilly Radar. It came as kind of a moment of clarity for me on how the whole gov2.0 space is shaping up. I think it's important to understanding DIYcity's place in the ecosystem of civic data - as well as understanding any other effort in relation to the whole. This could easily have been a post to DIYcity instead of Radar, but it ended up there. So I'll link out to it.

See the post here: http://bit.ly/r1grg

-j.

I will be out of the office starting 11/06/2009 and will not return until
22/06/2009.

For any urgent enquiries, I will be available on 0417 986 951. You can also
contact the City of Perth Marketing office on 9461 3132, otherwise I will
respond to your email upon my return.
For any City of Perth Winter Arts Season queries, please contact
rebecca.hughes@cityofperth.wa.gov.au

Thanks, Melissa.

Here are links to some posts in various groups this week, summarized for those of you in the Main Group:

In DIY Chicago: DIYcity Chicago Get-Together (old thread with new life)

In Discussions: Outlining a DIYcity 1.0

In DIY Vancouver: Tool Lending Library

In DIY Atlanta: Atlanta Crime Report

In Discussions: A DIYcity 1.0 Framework

-j.

I've spent the last few weeks thinking about the next stage for DIYcity, rather than posting to the site. As I mentioned in an earlier post, everyone, including myself, feels like it is time for DIYcity to make a leap to the next stage. The site has had some good successes, some good proof of concepts, has been instrumental in developing a certain kind of thinking about cities and the web, and now needs to start doing all of that even better. But what that means, and how to get there, has been uncertain. Now I think I have a good idea for this. Certainly, at the least, I have a very interesting idea. Rather than talk about the idea itself though, I'm just going to start steering the site slowing in that direction.

So all new posts you'll see from me are going to be with that idea in mind - the idea of this next stage and how to get there.

Please keep posting whatever you want to the site in the meantime. That element of DIYcity is will not go away regardless of what stage DIYcity is at.

The letter to New York City's Mayor Bloomberg regarding the creation of an Open 311 System in the City was delivered this morning. This letter was the product of a conversation that happened here on DIYcity a few weeks ago, and the thoughts and ideas that emerged from that. I've posted the full letter in the DIY New York City group - please check it out.

If anyone in other cities wants to re-use this letter, with appropriate alterations, to address their own city governments, please feel free. It should be considered an open document and a template for future use.

I'm back from San Jose, where I presented DIYcity to a room of mapping and GIS professionals and enthusiasts at O'Reilly Where 2.0 last week (photo here). The presentation was well-received, with lots of people approaching me with good ideas and feedback afterwards. (One idea I liked: DIYcity should build apps that are *more* local, that people implement at the neighborhood level, not the city level. The reasoning was that neighborhoods are the basic cellular unit of community, easier to get adoption, and then easier to replicate from neighborhood to neighborhood).

Now since I've been back I've been working on the 311 document that everyone submitted ideas on a few weeks ago. We should have something good on that soon, and I'll let you know as soon as we do.

Also today SickCity is featured in the Wall Street Journal, in a story titled "Health Data Proves Contagious On Social Media". If you have a subscription, see it here. If not, you can see a version of it on MarketWatch here.

BTW, the media story about SickCity currently is how we got trounced by all of the bad data from the swine flu epidemic, and how we are learning from that. But in fact the site itself seems to be working great these days - very low noise, very good signal. We're making a few more tweaks to it, and at that point I wouldn't put it past SickCity to actually pick up on a flu outbreak in a city in real time if one occurred. So I think the swine flu was good for SickCity all in all, and I think it's time for a new storyline about it.

On a more general level, I feel like SickCity definitely proves the central premise of DIYcity, namely that ordinary people working with freely-available data can build tools that can make their cities work better - and not just marginally better, but radically better. What else can we do in this regard? A lot I think.

But mostly on my mind right now is how to take DIYcity to the next level. It is clear to me and to everyone I talk to that it's ready to go there, and it's got to go there. The question is just where "there" is exactly and how to get there. Any silence from me on the site these days is really just due to that question swimming around in my head. Rather than creating lots of new activity on the site, I would rather push it to a new level and then create that activity. I've been having lots of very good chats with people on how to do this, people like Fred Wilson of USV, several notable people and groups out west, and friends here in NYC. I'm getting a good picture in my mind now of where to take this. It's not 100% clear yet, but I feel like all it needs is about 3 espressos, a notepad, and a spare hour to get me there.

Hopefully I'll get a window for that to happen soon, make a plan and have something to report on!

If you have a moment to read and respond to this blog post at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I would appreciate it. Part of the difficulty in getting open gov data is raising it to awareness as a priority.

Milwaukee County mapping site using copyrighted data
By Ben Poston of the Journal Sentinel
May. 26, 2009
http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/45709292.html

Just as the federal government begins to provide data in Web developer-friendly formats, we're organizing Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge to demonstrate that when government makes data available, it makes itself more accountable and creates more trust and opportunity in its actions. The contest submissions will also show the creativity of developers in designing compelling applications that provide easy access and understanding for the public, while also showing how open data can save the government tens of millions of dollars by engaging the development community in application development at far cheaper rates than traditional government contractors.

• First Place (1): $10,000
• Second Place (1): $5,000
• Third Place (1): $2,500
• Honorable Mention (10): $500

http://sunlightlabs.com/contests/appsforamerica2/

A few hours ago, Vancouver's city government posted the agenda to a council meeting next week in which this motion will be read:

MOTION ON NOTICE
Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source...

http://eaves.ca/2009/05/14/vancouver-enters-the-age-of-the-open-city/

For those of you who don't like reading through long blog posts for salient details, here is that last post in bullet points:

• We're trying out a new experiment in which people on the site will work together building open source civic software, then sell versions of those products as iPhone apps.

• The money from the sales of those apps will go back to the builders of the product.

• The underlying code will remain open source i.e. reusable, able to be built on, or distributed as people see fit.

• Nothing else about the site is going to change.

• We will start off this experiment with the two apps we've already got in production, DIYtraffic and SickCity, and maybe also on a third, new project.

• If these trials seem interesting to people and get product built, we will roll it out further.

• We'll begin next week.

Over and out!

DIYcity launched a little over six months ago, as a place for people to reinvent their cities with technology. The idea was not to simply create a place where people would talk about what you could do with technology, but to make a place where people actually build that technology, launch it, and give it to the world to use.

In that six months the site has grown more than I expected, and in ways I wouldn't have guessed. Yet for its relative success, it has yet to become a place busy with product development and launches. In its half year of existence, DIYcity has launched just two projects, both still in v1 as of now. At that rate, the challenge posed on the home page, can we build the Do-It-Yourself City, is a long way from being satisfied.

This needs to go faster. I want to see a thousand DIYcity projects launched, not two.

Having worked for a few months with the people who are doing DIYtraffic and SickCity, I've gotten to see the problem with developing all of this do-good, open source civic software: it's that there is no payback for it. People love the idea of it, they love reading about it, they love thinking about it, they even love working on it. But in the end, it just doesn't make sense to keep slaving away at it, at the level required to build products that actually make a difference in people's lives. Especially when the people working on those projects are barely making ends meet with their regular, paying jobs. Or when those people are getting laid off from work and having to move to other cities in search of new work. In the face of all that, it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep putting in the hard work on a project that only satisfies your urge to do something for the public good. There has to be more reward in it than that. And there should be more reward in it.

That's why I think if this whole thing is going to work, it's got to pay. It has to pay YOU, the person who (ostensibly) gives your valuable time to the project. We have to complete the circuit, create a feedback loop for people.

So with that in mind, we're trying a little experiment here on DIYcity. We're going to build open source code together in ad hoc groups (like we've been doing), make it free and open to all, BUT, we're then going to build iPhone apps on top of that code, sell those apps for money, and distribute that money back to the people who built the code in the first place, dividing it up in a way that is fair to all.

We're going to pay you to help reinvent your city.

Well, we're not going to pay you, the market's going to pay you. Hopefully it will pay you a lot, and keep paying you.

To make this work, I'm setting up an llc this week through which we can channel the proceeds and distribute them to people. Once that is set up, we'll be out the gate and running.

In the meantime, I'll be starting a few discussions about the details, and I'd love people's feedback on them, to hone this idea and give it a better chance for success.

This is an experiment. There will be bumps along the way, which we'll get smoothed out as quickly as possible. But I think this can work, and produce some very good, exciting results. If it does, we'll roll it out further.

And maybe then one thousand DIYcity projects wont be so far off.

My past few weeks have been busy with DIYcity-related things that haven't lent themselves to posting on the site much. Briefly, I've been:

- working on a plan for DIYcity to take it to a new, bigger, more exciting and more effective level (a DIYcity 2.0!).

- working a whole lot on SickCity with the SickCity team, trying to stay ahead of last week's swine flu scare and the resulting tsunami of sickness-related twitter messages. (and writing about the team's efforts on O'Reilly Radar).

- attending, and presenting at, a conference in Princeton on City Planning, Civic Engagement and the Internet.

So my contribution to the site has been pretty minimal lately.

Luckily the site has enough people and enough momentum these days that it doesn't really need me to move it forward. Since I've been off doing other things, we've picked up a couple hundred new members, plus new local groups in such interesting places as Wellington, New Zealand and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (no post in that one yet!). We also have a lot of interesting posts in local groups and in Discussions, like this one by Clint about a retweeting service he's built.

Anyway, I'm mostly done with all of that stuff now, and back on the site, so expect to hear a lot more from me in the various groups in the coming days. I've learned a lot in the process of doing all of those things mentioned above, reflected on a lot, and will be working all of it back into the site over the next week or two.

So, onward we go!

Acting on a request from some health researchers in the U.S., we've been trying for the last 24 hours to improve SickCity's algorithms to be able to track new developments of the swine flu outbreak.

After initially being flooded with tweets about the swine flu *media event* as opposed to actual flu outbreaks, the tool has now gotten to be a lot stronger - we're now able to ignore a large percentage of tweets that are about the media event, to focus on tweets about actual sickness. We're also tracking better terms - for instance instead of 'headcold', we're tracking 'fever'. We still have to make it stronger, however - among other things we have to get better at sniffing out false positives (e.g. "spring fever" should not trigger alert for "fever"). We also still have to flush out all of the false positives we have accumulated in the past 24 hours - the site right now looks like a gigantic flu outbreak happened all over the world simultaneously. That will be fixed some time today.

What we really need right now is translation of terms into other languages. All of the countries in SickCity are tracking terms in english ("fever", "sore throat", "flu", etc). If anyone can help translate these terms and others into other languages, that would be a big help. We've set up a wiki page where you can do this. Should only take one minute to do.

Anyone else wanting to pitch in to make SickCity more accurate (especially anyone good at term extraction and elimination of false positives) please join the SickCity Development Group and post a note.

The whole premise of DIYcity from the very beginning has been not to focus merely on hypothetical discussion and idea exchange, but to actually assemble teams of people, distributed around the world, to build these ideas, launch them, improve on them, and see them get put to use by communities everywhere.

Of course to do that, we first had to come up with some ideas, and to do that we had to create an architecture of discussion - so that's where we started, and that's what we focused on at first, via DIYcity Challenges and the DIscussions Group.

Now we're at a point where we actually have some pretty good ideas, in various stages of pre- and post-launch existence, and we need an architecture that supports the distributed development of these projects - from breaking first ground on them, through launch, to support, and through continued refinement and extension.

As a first step toward creating that architecture of distributed development, we've created a new class of groups on DIYcity: Development Groups. You'll find them in the right-side nav, just below the Main Groups.

These groups exist as a common point of exchange for everyone participating in the development of a particular project on DIYcity. Conversation in these groups is between people working on a project, and relates to the actual development of the project in question. If there's a project you want to get involved with and contribute to, joining that project's Development Group is a good place to start.

Right now there are three Development Groups: a SickCity Dev Group, a DIYtraffic Dev Group, and a Phone Tracker Dev Group.

As we come up with more good ideas and move them into development phase, this list will get much longer. And soon you will be able to add your own development group to DIYcity and start a discussion on your own about developing a particular application.

We have more plans for ways to build out and support this architecture of participation and development on DIYcity, so that the site is really humming along. Look for some fun and exciting changes to happen in the coming weeks...

Today we've activated some much-needed and long-awaited improvements to DIYcity which should make your user experience much more pleasurable as you continue to reinvent the world around you with others here on the site.

Lots of changes have been made, more than I will go into here, but the main ones are:

1. You can now choose to receive email for any group as a daily digest instead of individually. Lots of people have been complaining about this since day one, as sometimes threads take off in Discussions so fast that you can turn around and have 20 emails in your inbox. If that kind of thing doesn't appeal to you, just do this:

- log in

- go to the page for the group in question

- click on "My Membership" in the left-side nav

- select "receive daily digest" and submit.

(you can also use this form to turn on emails if you aren't getting them for a group, or turn them off altogether).

2. Email messages from groups should now appear with the sender's username in the FROM: field. Formerly emails came in with the group's name in the FROM field, which meant you had no idea who was sending the email. This should be a nice timesaver, giving you that info w/o having to click the message.

3. Posts on the home page now say what group they were posted from. There are so many groups on DIYcity now that the home page shows conversations from all over the place . Without that group info attached to the messages, you have no context about what you're reading, who sent it and who the intended audience is. Now all posts appear with clickable group info in the header, like so:

Submitted by davidberch on 14 April 2009 - 6:59pm to DIY El Paso, TX.

4. Lastly, the timeout error on submissions of new posts that was haunting DIYcity for so long is now closed. It has been closed for a while now, but I wanted to repost that in case anyone is still nervous about posting to the site and being met with a scary blank screen.

Okay, that's all! Slow week on the site this week, which as usual means big things are in the works behind the scenes...

Hi all -- I'm guest-blogging on O'Reilly Radar this month about DIYcity-related themes. The first post, 'The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory', went live yesterday and seems to have been met with enthusiasm. Please check it out at:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/the-future-of-our-cities-open.html

Will be posting once a week for the next month. If you want you can follow via RSS here: http://radar.oreilly.com/jgeraci/

-john

That's how I'm reading it. This post says it targets Sling, but it
looks like it applies to many other server or data apps not directly
in a browser.

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/04/03/as-if-things-arent-bad-enough-atandt-term...

What do other folks think?

--
Center for Community
Lower Eastside Girls Club
http://www.girlsclub.org

The Daily Glyph
http://www.gomaya.com/glyph

Cell 646 704 2021

I just created a new group on the site, SickCity Development, where the discussion about making SickCity better will happen between the people working on it. Anyone who wants should join in and participate.

I did this for a couple of reasons: one, there's a very interesting conversation going on about improving SickCity right now among those developing it, but it's totally invisible to everyone except the developers. I wanted to make that conversation visible to all. Two, this is supposed to be a crowdsourced project, and if all of the conversations happen behind closed doors, there wont be much crowdsourcing going on, beyond what we've already got.

So going forward we will try to have as much of our communication about development as possible go through this group, so that the process can be seen by all, and contributed to by any who care to get involved.

Check it out. To start it off I just posted 3 of the most recent emails sent regarding the improvement of SickCity.

I've been too busy lately to even post a quick note to the site here, but DIYcity Challenge #7 is finally online in Discussions.

The challenge: help city agencies everywhere to open their data by building a site scraper and API for them.

See here for the full scoop.

It suddenly feels like we've come a long way with DIYcity in a pretty short time - we've launched a few apps that are getting a lot of attention around the web, the site itself and the idea behind it is starting to catch people's ear, and our numbers continue to grow.

I feel like there could be a DIYcity tipping point approaching somewhere in the not-too-distant future.

This week, though, rather than focusing on that, I'm feeling a need to try to consolidate what we've done so far. SickCity and DIYtraffic are close to being actual, useful tools, ready for adoption and use by cities. We've also got a lot of ideas hanging half-finished on the site that I would love to see pushed farther. I've seen now how much traction these ideas have when they're presented right, and I think we've got several ideas ripe for that kind of thing.

So this week, rather than launching into a new round of Challenges, I personally want to focus on making what we already have better.

If anyone wants to help out on that in any way, drop a note. I'll also start these up in Discussions, so you can jump in if you want.

Here's what I want to work on this week:

- improving SickCity, making it more accurate, testing it against real health data for cities

- improving DIYtraffic: giving it a front-end, adding new data sources, making it easier for people to set it up in their city

- getting a Taxi Share app started: I think this idea is ripe, and I have an idea or two on how it could happen. will post more on that in Discussions.

- getting a Rideshare app spec'd out. a couple people have written to me and are interested in seeing this happen. would love to figure out what this app should be.

And of course anyone else is free to propose anything they want in the Discussions group, as I see is already happening. Love to see that!

DIYcity's new app SickCity is on Daily Kos today, under the question "can social networking change the face of public health?" My answer to that is it can, it must, and it will.

Why? Because the costs of public health mandate it. Costs of basic health services are already too high, never mind adding new services to the mix. Meanwhile, mining data that is out on the web, ready to be mined, is so cheap as to be essentially free (it has cost us no money so far to build SickCity, just a few dollars out of pocket).

So, in order to grow, become better, and not break the government bank, public health will need to start considering smart, cost-effective alternatives for services, and they will eventually look to using openly accessible data, data of all sorts - including social network data.

The SickCity team, btw, now has a statistician on board, looking over the algorithm to see how we can make the service more accurate. Version 1 works well in a very rough sense - how well can we make version 2 work, with someone who actually knows this stuff?

Stay tuned!

DIYcity started off in October 2008 as a simple online community where people could talk about ways that they could use technology to make their cities work better. The idea was to get people talking about this together, trade ideas, discover best practices, and help stimulate change.

I think we have already succeeded in doing that, in a few short months.

But along the way, a bigger idea began to emerge. It has been implicit on the site for a while, but I've never actually spelled it out anywhere. I felt like I should do that now.

So, here now, as I see it, is the big challenge for DIYcity, the question we're all, aware or unaware, working on together:

Can we, collectively, come up with a complete set of tools that ordinary people everywhere can plug into to make their cities work better? Can we create, effectively, a version 1.0 of an operating system for a new, user-operated city? A city where information is open and flows easily from government offices to residents, from residents back to government, and from residents to other residents, to create a tight-knit information ecology that improves life in cities for all?

And can we, rather than talking about it, actually spur that transformation to happen within cities?

I want people to be able to come to DIYcity, look through an index of (open source) applications, find the ones that are set up for their city and use them, or else set them up for their city if they aren't configured yet. One person should be able to come to the site, and with a little bit of energy activate a whole new service for his or her city.

That is the Do-It-Yourself City. That's what we're working towards.

How we get there exactly is less important to me than that we get there. Challenges, Discussions, whatever, are just tactics for the big goal, of assembling, or pointing to, this collection of tools that people can plug into anywhere to make their cities work, with or without the help of their local government.

And hopefully the local governments will get on board with this movement. I think they will, personally. I think they will have to, actually (that's a separate post). But a central idea of DIYcity is that we shouldn't wait around for the governments to give us tools for our cities. We can, and should, go out and build them ourselves, and let the governments get involved when they're ready.

That's where I see us going on DIYcity at this point, the Big Picture. Can we do this?

Some of the people who have worked on DIYcity projects so far have proposed a set of loose design principles for building DIYcity apps.

These are not hard, fast rules for building things with DIYcity, but are rather guidelines for helping developers think about how DIYcity-type applications should be built.

These guidelines are now online at http://diycity.org/diycity-design-principles

Please check them out! Comments and suggestions welcome.

Since we launched SickCity on March 10th, the site has spread quickly around the world. The tool allows users to activate the service for their own city from the sickcity.org website, and users have responded, creating a version of SickCity for more than 55 cities around the world as of this writing. (Many of these are still having data imported for them this very minute.)

Clearly it's a fascinating service to follow.

The equally important issue, of exactly how well it works as an alert system, is harder to determine at the moment. After all, it's impossible to get realtime disease data for cities (which is why people at DIYcity built SickCity, of course). The premise is sound though, and we're confident that over time, with enough refinement and addition of new data, this kind of detection will get better, it will grow, and maybe eventually become commonplace.

For now, SickCity should be looked at as a compelling first start at city-level, realtime disease detection. Which is, in a sense, a historical first, especially in that it works for multiple cities simultaneously. Imagine if John Snow had had access to this kind of data during the London Cholera outbreak of 1854. This kind of realtime analysis at the local level is only going to get better and better as tools improve. And we at DIYcity intend to be pushing that envelope as much as possible.

If you want to help the team working on the project to make SickCity better, write to us at diy@diycity.org and we'll put you in touch. And if you want a version of SickCity in your city, go to the site and add it!

And congrats to the team that got it off the ground and continue to refine it.

The new DIYcity Challenge is now online in Discussions here:

http://diycity.org/discussions/diycity-challenge-6-special-challenge

Check it out.

Came across the site for BBC Backstage

"backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC's developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent. Content feeds are available for people to build with on a non-commercial basis."

Some prototypes that are leveraging these feeds:

Disruption alerts for UK train services by Twitter
BBC Programmes via Jabber
Infused News and Entertainment
Track Playing updates

The team who put together SickCity, which launched just three days ago, have already put out an upgraded version of it. This 1.1 version addresses a lot of UI problems that had been noted, makes the pages a bit friendlier on the eye, has a more accurate algorithm for measuring conversation about disease, and addresses a slew of other minor things as well.

Mostly though, in my opinion, it just looks awesome now. Something you would spend a lot more time looking at than the previous version.

God it will be great to get those maps actually working with data, huh?

Anyway, please check it out. Here are links straight to city pages, for those of you living in these areas:

New York: http://sickcity.org/USA/New%20York
London: http://sickcity.org/England/London
Sydney: http://sickcity.org/Australia/Sydney
Austin, TX: http://sickcity.org/USA/Austin
San Francisco: http://sickcity.org/USA/San%20Francisco
Dublin: http://sickcity.org/Ireland/Dublin

For those of you not living in those areas, there is a form on the home page of the site to add your city to the system - give it a try.

I'm very excited to announce the newest application by people here at DIYcity. The app is called SickCity, and it provides realtime detection for disease outbreak in cities.

How, you say?

It works by monitoring status messages on Twitter (and soon on Facebook) in cities around the world, tallying up disease keywords such as "flu", "fever", "food poisoning", "chicken pox" and so on. It then takes those tallies and creates a 30-day chart for each keyword in each city. This lets you see in one glance whether conversation about a particular disease is high, low, increasing, decreasing, or not changing. This, in turn, should give you a good idea when an outbreak is afoot.

Here's food for thought: with a budget of $0, we've created an app that may in fact do a reasonably good job at notifying people when there's a nasty outbreak happening in their immediate vicinity.

Is it perfect? No. Is it a prototype? Yes. Will it get better? Definitely.

I cannot say enough good things about the team that put it together. The DIYcity Challenge on this was issued less than a week ago, and immediately several followers of the site chimed in with ideas. Before two days had gone by, we had a rough prototype and a full roadmap, and were chugging toward the finish line. Special congrats to Paul Watson for his masterful prototyping and delivery of the final RoR code. And thanks to all the others for their contributions as well.

Please go check it out...

site: http://sickcity.org
full explanation, credits, etc here

Well another week has come and gone, and though it has been fairly quiet here on the site itself for the past few days, there is a buzz of activity going on behind the scenes and off the lists. An absolute buzz! Hopefully that will result in something exciting manifesting next week for everyone to check out.

In the meantime: welcome to the new local groups in Waterford Ireland, Kinston North Carolina, and Berlin. Know anyone living in those areas? Tell em to join DIYcity!

Also, here is an article passed to me by fellow DIYcity'er Dave Pentecost:

ZDNet Australia writes that NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second-most-popular application in its category in Apple's App Store.

read full slashdot article here:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/06/0357204

Enjoy the weekend, see you back here first thing Monday morning...

For those of you not listening in on the Discussions group, DIYcity Challenge #5: Outbreak! is now online there:

http://diycity.org/challenge/diycity-challenge-5-outbreak

Back in the days of the railway, Winnipeg was Canada's hub. We were, and are, the center of the country. But what about now? Walk downtown and the signs of a stagnant economy is everywhere. Not to mention the feeling that our city lacks innovative thinking in the upper echelons.

If small business is the key economic driver of any urban area, how can we attract innovative small business to Winnipeg, and how can we encourage more Winnipegers to start them.

Y Combinator, an American incubator that provides small amounts of seed funding to startups. Its head honcho, Paul Graham, has put together an excellent article contemplating how any city could become the next hub for startups like Silicon Valley. Here it is:

http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html

There is so much going on on this site these days, and it's spread out over so many sections, that I'm trying to start writing week-in-review emails to point people to things they may have missed during the course of the week.

And this week was a big week, so I might as well get started now.

First of all - welcome to all of the local groups that are new this week. We have new groups for Mexico City, Amsterdam, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Curitiba, Campinas, Belo Horizonte, Singapore, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Louisville KY and Grand Rapids Michigan. Whew. We hope to see these groups becoming hotbeds of local DIY action and look forward to their contributions to the central discussions as well. If you know people in those cities, tell 'em to sign up for their local DIYcity group!

Second, we launched DIYtraffic to a nice, loud and positive reception on blogs and on Twitter. As of now we have seven instances of the app running in different cities, with plans being made for the app to be launched in London and elsewhere. If you want to add your two cents on making that package better, you can do so here.

Lastly, there was the beginnings of a good discussion on things you could do to make biking in cities easier, which sort of got sidetracked midweek by the launch of DIYtraffic. Maybe we'll pick back up on that for a day or two next week and see if we come away with anything good before we move on.

Next week we hope to make more big advances in the whole DIYcity idea. This is getting fun as it picks up steam.

See you all then...

If you look at the wiki page where people add links to the instances of DIYtraffic that they've set up for their own area, you will see that the app is now running in Chicago, Fairfax VA, Portland OR, Rockville MD, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

Not bad, but can we go further? How many local instances of DIYtraffic can we get up and running today?

Instructions for installation are here: http://diycity.org/wiki/index.php?title=DIYtraffic_-_Instructions_for_In... and installation is a pretty quick and painless affair. Dan Greenblatt, who spearheaded the development effort, has also offered to configure our version of the app to run additional cities if anyone wants, so if you want a DIYtraffic in your town but don't have a server to put it on, write to him at dan dot greenblatt at gmail dot com and he'll do it for you.

If you do launch a DIYtraffic, be sure to 1) point back to this page explaining it, 2) tell people what it is in the bio area and 3) tweet about it to spread the word.

BTW, DIYtraffic works just fine for cities outside of the U.S., if you give it an RSS feed for local traffic updates. The feed we're currently using, from Yahoo, is only for the U.S. unfortunately (why is that??).

I'm excited to announce that DIYcity's first app, DIYtraffic, is now live and running for 3 cities, and the source code is available for download by anyone who wants to set it up for other cities.

The app was built to be easily configurable for any city in the U.S (or any city in the world, provided there's an RSS feed for traffic updates to be found).

This beta version of the app, when configured, does the following:

- posts all traffic incidents for the city in question to a Twitter feed, allowing users to receive these traffic alerts as SMS messages to their phone if they want
- accepts queries from followers on specific streets, and returns traffic info for just that street
- accepts user-generated traffic alerts for the city and reposts those to the feed.

There are lots of other useful things it could do as well, but we figured this was a good start.

DIYtraffic emerged out of a discussion held on the site about using Twitter to alert people to traffic problems. As the first app created here, it's a proof of concept for the idea of DIYcity as a place where conversation about applications can turn into actual applications, able to be used by anyone. As exciting as it is to see DIYtraffic launch, it is doubly so to see that proof of concept happen.

Anyway, check out the full explanation, with running examples, links to the source code, and instructions on how to use it here: http://diycity.org/diytraffic-realtime-traffic-alerts

And follow the DIYtraffic feed in your town!

Kudos to Dan Greenblatt for pushing this through and making it happen.

For those of you not subscribed to the Discussions group, DIYcity Challenge #4 is now online there. http://diycity.org/challenge/diycity-challenge-4-bikes

Apologies for the radio silence over the past week, we've been immersed in server upgrades and putting finishing touches on DIYtraffic, which is ready to launch as soon as it has a home. We will now resume with our regularly scheduled programming.

While we were gone, DIY Cincinnati had some interesting posts on DIY things they could do for their city. And they're planning a meetup, too. Check it out!

There are some changes taking place on DIYcity this week, which are indicative of the way the site/organization is going, so we wanted to share with you:

• We're moving the site to a new server, one that gives us control over config files and such. This will happen later in the week, and will allow us to easily run our own apps on the site. This is a big step toward DIYcity becoming a place that actually launches and runs applications that reinvent cities, rather than just being a place for people to talk about these things.

• We're setting up a DIYcity code repository on GitHub. This will allow code for our apps to be accessed, shared, forked, and built on by anyone, easily. This too is a big step toward becoming the site we want DIYcity to be.

Once those two pieces are in place, the runway will be clear for takeoff.

And speaking of taking off, the First DIYcity Project is having finishing touches put on it by the awesome team of people who volunteered to make it happen. Hopefully if the right elements combine, we will have something to show early next week.

In the meantime, if you haven't already, brush up on last week's interesting discussions about Cooperative Bike Shares, and the prospect of setting up a test in Portland, as well as Distributed Bus Pingers. More good conversations to come this week...

Last week was a busy week behind the scenes at DIYcity, and hence a slow week on the site itself, so I wanted to give a quick update on the site for all.

First, you may have noticed that the right nav has changed a bit. We now have links to a centralized "Challenges" page, a centralized "Projects" page and a centralized "Specs" page (as well as a centralized "releases" page which isn't active yet). This is all reflective of the way in which DIYcity is evolving from a place where random conversations happen and go nowhere, to a place where focused conversations happen and lead to actual product that communities can use. This is pretty exciting, but it's also still pretty early in this evolution, so there's not a whole lot to look at yet there. I'll post more on this idea before too long.

Then, lots of work was done last week on the first DIYcity project, outlined here, and the people involved are getting very close to a 1.0 release. Exciting. Hopefully more news on that this week.

Next, a lot of what has been happening with this 1.0 project has really just involved nailing down the basic design philosophy that should guide DIYcity development - questions like "should this app live on one central server for every community, or should communities all set it up individually on their own servers?" It's an interesting discussion and I'd like everyone who wants to chime in on it. I'll post what we've got to the wiki in a bit and invite additions/subtractions/comments. Getting to a good, common understanding of a design philosophy seems like a big step toward getting DIYcity going as a real place for development and change.

Lastly, you may have noticed a lot of test emails coming in over the weekend. We're still trying to wrangle with that mysql/php bug that happens whenever someone posts to a group with lots of members. No solutions yet, short of moving to a dedicated server. Remember for now: if you post a new message to the site and see garbled mysql errors, DON'T repost - your post went through just fine.

Okay, now on with the show!

John

Transit Television Network, a subsidiary of Torstar (owner of Canada's biggest daily newspaper), has filed for bakruptcy.

In Milwaukee and other cities where it set up on buses, TTV seems universally loathed for reasons mentioned by this LA blogger: http://metroriderla.com/2006/12/03/transit-tv-how-we-hate-thee/

Worst of all, TTV has been an infection in public space. As a local rider puts it, TTV content screams one message over and over: "You are a Bus Rider; You are a Loser. This xxxxxx will save you from your misery. $19.95 and operators are standing by." Or a free PC by giving up your phone number and checking account number. Or the scams that came to us with the SAME actor, different names for the scams, but just call 800 xxx xxxx and your life will be turned around -- $500,000 from your home in one month. No one in their right minds would call such a number but that shouting sent a clear coherent message: You Are A Loser. And that message has pervaded bus service for the last decade.

My question: is there any way the existing hardware might be repurposed by creative groups to have a more publicly edifying message?