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.

Hi All,

Open Gov NYC is running a workshop on collaborative policy building:

http://iyear.us/2009/04/21/anyone-can-be-a-wonk/

It's process-focused for now, but will hopefully lead to application development in the future.

-Matt

Hi Bemfica, I was going to create a group for Barcelona and I found this one. Can you explain why it is called Barcelona for inmigrantes? Is there something specifically related to this group that you want to work on?

so the prototype pinger that novalis developed looks really great. (see here: http://bit.ly/19Mhii).

how can others get involved? what are next steps? can we get, say, 20 people in a single city to load this app on their phone and do a bigger test?

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...

Cityleft works for a new theoretical and practical scenario in urban planning.
The new scenario is called Urbanism 3.0 (http://www.presstletter.com/articolo.asp?articolo=2013).
In Urbanism 3.0, Urban Art Interventions and Peer to Peer (P2P) projects are conceived to simulate alternative urban scenarios in public space capable to affect region making as well urban planning, involving the participation of a broad research community made of urbanists, social workers, NGOs, environmental artists, graphic designers, minorities, inhabitants, and so on.

The independence of the Baltic Countries from Soviet Union is, perhaps, the most important event in the Baltic Sea Region in the last century. Its importance lies in the economic, social, and spatial follow ups caused to the entire region.

One of these follow ups is the gradual economic integration between Scandinavian and Baltic countries. Some scholar call it “economic colonization”, imposed, by the established Nordic countries (i.e. Sweden and Finland), to unstable, but growing, Baltic economies.
This layer of transnational integration brought to cities such as Tallinn huge financial resources to “re-boot” the economic system after 50 years of communist impasse. At the same time, these chaotic economic dynamics caused the spatial disintegration of Tallinn in an “Archipelago” of separate urban islands (Central Business District, old city centre, socialist districts, restored garden neighbourhoods, brownfield areas, etc.).

On the other hand, the “migration”, as somebody called it, of the Russian boarders to the east, left millions of Russian Speaking (russophones) people in an incipient diasporic space, which led to the socio-spatial exclusion of a considerable part of the local population.
This layer of social local-disintegration overlaps with the previous one (the spatial transnational-disintegration), making “Archipelago”, and its in-between space, an even more accurate model.

Cityleft has developed, in the form of a proposal, a “third conceptual layer” which empowers local stakeholders toward the social sustainability of disintegrated urban spaces. The name of this latter layer is Urbanism 3.0. We interpret the ongoing financial crisis as an unique chance to develop Urbanism 3.0 in post-communist countries.

In Urbanism 3.0, Urban Art Interventions and Peer to Peer (P2P) projects are conceived to simulate alternative urban scenarios in public space capable to affect region making as well urban planning.

P2P processes are activated by the direct participation of local stakeholders. In other words the P2P philosophy aims to create streams of open-share knowledge available for the whole community. In this frame, urbanists, social workers, NGOs, environmental artists, graphic designers, minorities, and inhabitants work together in open-share projects related to urban issues such as atlas, courses, digital platform to collect social feedbacks, spatial strategies as well as formats for new social policies. This active form of participation is inspired to trans-disciplinary research and it is aimed to address local urban issues. It constitutes, insofar, a challenge to bring in the material world the energies of the virtual communities which have created, step by step, the P2P phenomenon [4]. A layout for this approach has been drawn up last July at Bauhaus Dessau Foundation [5].

Urban Art Interventions, on the other hand, are conceived to simulate and put in practice alternative urban scenarios. Through the direct participation of local stakeholders in P2P workshops, UAIs aim to collect indirect social feedbacks from the local milieu made of inhabitants, commuter, and city users. Since performance are addressed in public space, anyone can interact and leave her/his personal trace. Those feedbacks are then re-analyzed by the P2P workshops to refine strategies and projects.

We believe that this new methodology can seriously improve the quality and the quantity of urban research. Therefore, we are collecting researchers, friends, public institutions, architects, artists, and so forth in the working platform Cityleft .altervista.org to implement Urbanism 3.0-oriented projects.

This is a group for people working on the development of DIYtraffic.

See here for release notes on DIYtraffic.

See here for documentation on the project and code.

There is no doubt that the ongoing financial crisis will have a negative impact on spending on urban research. Alternatively, the current impasse of real-estate may present an opportunity for urbanists (scholars as well as practitioners) to contemplate and develop new practices that would enrich urban studies and empower local communities. In this article we present the examples of two Urban Art Interventions (UAIs) that were part of two different research projects carried out in the Helsinki-Tallinn region over the past four years.

In 2005 Michail Galanakis created “Olohuone”, an urban intervention discussed in his doctoral dissertation Space Unjust [1]. Olohuone was the symbolic representation of a private living-room, brought out of context and given to the public. For a week, it re-signed different meanings within the particular few square meters of floor space in the West Hall of Helsinki Railway Station.

There were aspirations, hopes and desires concerning Olohuone; it was meant to be inclusive of the ‘Other’ of Helsinki, of the city-centre, and of the Station in particular. Despite Galanakis' aspirations, fears, and intentions, Olohuone turned out to have a life of its own through peoples’ micro-appropriations. To think of something as one’s own without an explicit permission, that is the kind of appropriation we are talking about. This is not a clear-cut process; it has nuances and engenders fears and negotiations about these fears. In a setting, such as Olohuone, the appropriator exposes her/himself; it is both a weakening and empowering situation.

In 2007/2008 the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (Germany) brought together an international group to explore the complex dynamics of trans-national urbanism in the Baltic Sea Region. Within this framework Agatino Rizzo developed the Helsinki-Tallinn Region as case of study [2].

A double layer dynamic produced in Tallinn’s urban landscape an “Archipelago of islands”, each having different economic, social, and cultural milieus. These latter hypotheses were tested in Tallinn through a series of public interventions in May 2008. The UAIs in Tallinn were conceived to be highly interactive and intuitive, suggesting and collecting social-local feedbacks: “Porta de Viru” was a performance aimed to visualize the possible boarders of those urban “islands” with stripes, banners, and gates; “Tallinn Re-told” aimed to build a more intimate relation between research group and inhabitants; “Wind-up” helped to explore potentials in the urban space between those islands (Inverspace).

Olohuone as Tallinn’s interventions were research performances open for public use and abuse (the latter although expected didn't happen). Both practices constituted a soft urban design approach that paid off, especially considering that fact that they all took place on a really little budget.

The empirical data retrieved during Olohuone as well as Tallinn’s interventions was the biggest return, along with the trust which both researchers gained concerning the unknown public. In these financially gloomy times UAIs could help us do research while livening up the city on low budget.

Insofar, we believe that in Helsinki as in Tallinn a new methodological horizon has been traced in the field of Urban Planning .We tried to label it as Urbanism 3.0 [3]. Urbanism 3.0 is an evolution of Mark Gottdiener’s socio-spatial approach in the sense that a more attention is paid on social interaction. In Urbanism 3.0, UAIs and Peer to Peer (P2P) projects are conceived to simulate alternative urban scenarios in public space capable to affect region making as well urban planning.

P2P processes are activated by the direct participation of local stakeholders. In other words the P2P philosophy aims to create streams of open-share knowledge available for the whole community. In this frame, urbanists, social workers, NGOs, environmental artists, graphic designers, minorities, and inhabitants work together in open-share projects related to urban issues such as atlas, courses, digital platform to collect social feedbacks, spatial strategies as well as formats for new social policies. This active form of participation is inspired to trans-disciplinary research and it is aimed to address local urban issues. It constitutes, insofar, a challenge to bring in the material world the energies of the virtual communities which have created, step by step, the P2P phenomenon [4]. A layout for this approach has been drawn up last July at Bauhaus Dessau Foundation [5].

Urban Art Interventions, on the other hand, are conceived to simulate and put in practice alternative urban scenarios. Through the direct participation of local stakeholders in P2P workshops, UAIs aim to collect indirect social feedbacks from the local milieu made of inhabitants, commuter, and city users. Since performance are addressed in public space, anyone can interact and leave her/his personal trace. Those feedbacks are then re-analyzed by the P2P workshops to refine strategies and projects.

We believe that this new methodology can seriously improve the quality and the quantity of urban research. Therefore, we are collecting researchers, friends, public institutions, architects, artists, and so forth in the working platform Cityleft .altervista.org to implement Urbanism 3.0-oriented projects.

[1] Michail Galanakis (2008) Space Unjust, Helsinki: Taik

[2] Agatino Rizzo et Al. (2008) Helsinki-Tallinn Region. Tracing networks in an archipelago of islands, Dessau: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

[3] Agatino Rizzo (2009) “The Multiple City. Tallinn as a possible project for the global cities of tomorrow”, in the C-series of the CURS, Helsinki University of Technology – YTK

[4] see Michel Bauwens and the P2P foundation http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
[5] see http://www.cityleft.altervista.org/neworld/plug.htm

Just curious guys, what are some ways that we can encourage people to drop off their cars at the parking terminals and take advantage of BRT? With new terminals coming online in the next few years, the city needs to develop some way to get people to use the new buses.

I like the idea that the city is putting in motion, but I still have doubts on how many people will be willing to let go of their vehicles to take the buses.