DIY Portland Oregon

Greetings DIY Portland. Wanted to post a link to your group in case you missed it in the Discussions or Main group: DIYtraffic, launched a few weeks ago (and still in deep beta) has a version running for Portland:

http://twitter.com/traffic_pdx.

Live heterogeneous feed of traffic alerts to your Twitter account. You can query it for info on a specific street or highway and get the results DM'ed to your phone.

Details on how to use it, how to extend it, etc, here:

http://diycity.org/diytraffic-realtime-traffic-alerts

New versions on their way.

Enjoy, use, give feedback, make better.

John

Our project, http://suddenly.org , uses print publications, visual art, public gatherings, and conversation to pursue the same political forms and futures that DIYcity catalyzes with newer technologies. We publish books, present visual art, invite people to gather, eat, and talk together, and then we write about it and bring the conversation to new places and people. This activity has taken shape across a huge geography. From Sergio Pastor's suddenly post 10/3/08 http://suddenly.org/?p=593 : "Suddenly is not only an inquiry, but also an attempt to enact a new urban form of gathering and dispersal — a deliberate form aimed at the creation of a public, a publication. This new urban form [is] a directed attempt to take inspiration from the models and possibilities of the organization of resources provided by new urban patterns in order to take these new patterns seriously." From DIYCITY: "How can these technologies — Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps — be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?" Suddenly asks the same question, but of the older technologies of printed matter and physical gathering and conversation. I think the awesome common path ahead for us is to bring these older and newer technologies together in a a big robust ecology of self-inventing, shifting, morphing cities.

Greetings DIY Portland!

I don't know how many of you are following along on the conversations happening in the Discussions group, but there is an interesting idea there for a Cooperative Bike Share that is sort of a grassroots, low-cost method for creating a municipal bikesharing program.

See explanation and discussion here:
http://diycity.org/discussions/cooperative-bike-share

It made me think of Portland for some reason.

Do you guys have a bike sharing program there, or one about to launch, and if not do you think Portland would be a good testbed for this (awesome) idea?

John