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Call to Work on the First DIYcity Project

Submitted by John Geraci on 21 January 2009 - 3:23am to DIYcity Main Group.

Hello all,

We are starting work on the first DIYcity project, and we need your help in building it.

It will be an app along the lines of the discussion on TrafficTweet that, when built, will give residents of local areas updates to their mobile phones about traffic problems around them.

The app will be open source and will be built in such a way that it can be easily adapted to work for any city or town in the U.S. (and if possible outside the U.S. as well).

We need:

- 1 - 2 web developers, well-versed in all of the things web developers should be well-versed in these days, specifically working with RSS and APIs.

- a UI designer

- a project wrangler

This is entirely a volunteer project.

Everyone who participates will be credited on the work.

If you'd like to help, write to diy@diycity.org.

Please forward this to anyone who might be interested.

UPDATE 2/4: This app has been designed and spec'd (see spec here) and is now in development. Release will be posted to the Main Group.

21 Jan17:01

Possible useful technologies

By dan.greenblatt

Hello -

Great idea; if this could reach a critical mass (which is always the most difficult and important part in crowd-sourced projects), I think it could prove really useful.

I wanted to throw out pointers to a couple of technologies, in addition or instead of Twitter, which I think could be really useful here.

TextMarks
This would enable us to create a custom text tag, say "DIY", which can be then hooked up to a script running anywhere on the web to return information to the user. So, I would text something like "DIY NYC 4" to 41411 to get information about the number 4 train in New York. This could be hooked up to a PHP script running on a dedicated server which could parse the input, scrape whatever info from the web (or from other users input!), and then return a response.

also, Twilio can serve as a voice interface to our system. It is a neat new technology which can basically serve as the glue between a voice call and that same script running on the same server. Instead of taking input in the form of text message, it takes input in the form of voice or DTMF input (i.e. key presses). Imagine being able to call a number and say "Chicago blue line" and it to respond to you that you'll have to take a bus for the last four stops. Neato (the technology, not the detour)

23 Jan16:00

Update on Call to Work

By John Geraci

We got several responses from people on the call to work earlier this week, and are now moving ahead with an idea based on people's input from the TrafficTweet discussion.

Hopefully we will have something to share with people soon.

23 Jan20:11

Wonderful idea, but extensible too if done right

By adamgreenfield

You know I'm thoroughly stoked by this whole initiative - that, in fact, I think every public object ought to offer an API, and where advisable, read/write access to same.

My only request is that when designing this particular application, your developers think agnostically. If it's thought through properly, whatever work they put into devising the API for this can be rolled out across all the varying classes of public objects one might conceivably want to endow with one: street furniture, building-scale display surfaces, infrastructural switching nodes of different sorts. And please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.