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A DIYcity 1.0 Framework

Submitted by John Geraci on 12 June 2009 - 4:58pm to Discussions.

I'm still thinking about the notion of a "user interface for cities and their residents", and thinking about what the key components of a 1.0 of such a system would be. This is, after all, what we've set out in some small way to work toward - a general user interface for cities everywhere, that residents of those cities can plug into. Maybe working toward that just means outlining what the main components are, maybe it means pointing to instances of it in each city, and maybe it means building it ourselves. Or maybe it is some combination of those three things.

At any rate, following up on Tuesday's post about outlining a DIYcity 1.0, I'm taking the very simple, conceptual step of taking those services I was talking about and thinking of them explicitly in terms of DIY:

DIY Transportation
DIY Police Services
DIY Emergency Care
DIY Public Health
DIY Waste Management

...plus:

DIY Education (added by nickyg)

and a few others:

DIY Resource Location
DIY Alt Transportation (bikes etc)
DIY Citizen Coordination

and I'm thinking of these as top-level categories for possible DIY applications.

Inside those categories of course you could fit hundreds of individual apps. And we will, eventually. But if we start by outlining the top-level categories for a user interface for cities, then we can start to think more clearly about what a 1.0 interface should include. Or rather what it needs to include.

(I left off of this list a lot of services that I think are not innately DIY-friendly: Fire service for instance. If you think I'm wrong to leave these things out of the framework for a DIYcity 1.0, let me know.)

So that's where I am today: with a rough outline of a framework for a DIYcity 1.0, a user interface for cities. That will get codified somewhat into the site itself going forward, and we will begin to formulate ideas around these.

I still feel like this is an incomplete list. I've gotten a few good responses from people off-list about this. If you have any other ideas on this, please send em my way.