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...

To my fellow El Paso friends, I apologize for neglecting Diy City for a while, but let's get this started! Being a border town, I think there is a unique opportunity to brainstorm on creating some apps that will help border towns across the globe.

Maybe we could develop a system that tracks air quality alerts. Pollution is a big issue in El Paso and Juarez and if there is a way to track it, I think it could be put to good use for the citizens on both sides of the border.

Maybe a way to track crossing times that could be accessed through text message on border crossing times for all of the different bridges.

What else would you like to see developed?

If you can't get a hold of me on here, you can reach me at www.livingelpaso.com

Let's help El Paso help change the world!

Haven't looked at this too closely yet, and have to run right now, but wanted to post it to Discussions - may be of interest.

The World Bank's first API offers 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos (see all sources). We are releasing this API because we believe this information can be mapped, visualized and mashed up in an unlimited number of ways that will help develop a better understanding of trends and patterns around key development issues.

See http://developer.worldbank.org/

hey all,
i came across this event scheduled for Saturday the 18th of April.
http://nyc.openeverything.us/
I haven't met the people involved, but here's an except from their main site http://openeverything.net :

Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open.
Open Everything was started by a few people back in the beginning of 2008, and it has grown to include events in cities around the world. New York is going to be the next and we'd be delighted if you would participate.

I'll probably stop by to check it out.
--liz

Planning the Edmonton ChangeCamp at http://groups.google.com/group/changecamp-edmonton?lnk= and http://wiki.changecamp.ca

Hi everybody!

I'd like to start this group with outlining the problematic things in moscow.
What are those things in moscow which are not good/not enough good and which are that way due to centralized organizational management or due to the absence of community?
What is constantly bugging you when you deal with the city?

Let's use this group to discuss development of a location pinging app for mobile phones that could be used as a distributed bus tracking device. This is something DIYcity and TOPP Labs are discussing building together. Anyone interested please join in.

This is not specific to NYC as I see it - a generic mobile phone pinger could be used in a variety of places and situations. So please feel free to join in regardless of where you are from.

Also, would love to get more than just developers working on this. Transportation specialists, urban planners - lots of viewpoints and specialties are needed here.

For previous discussion on phone pingers as distributed bus trackers, see this thread:

http://diycity.org/discussions/mobile-phone-pinger-bottom-tracking-syste...

There's no particular agenda here so don't wait for me to begin - just start posting if you feel the motivation.

Hey all - what's the likelihood of us getting SickCity upgraded along the lines we've been talking about by next week? Would love to have the new (and much better) version to show the people from the Department of Health. Think it would really impress.

Got this in my inbox the other day in response to a proposal on an open 311 system sent to Speaker Quinn. What are the chances they'll do something really open here?

Dear Mr. Geraci,

Thanks so much for your interest in our newly proposed 311 mobile application.

Right now, we're still working out the details for this new tool with the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT).

We're very excited about this new opportunity, and I'll be sure to keep your contact information on file as our discussions with DoITT move forward.

Thanks again for writing.

Sincerely,

Christine C. Quinn

Speaker

I wanted to let share with the group a new project I just started working on this week using the same technology as the @tamaletracker (twitter.com/tamaletracker). I spend a lot of time walking around Chicago and always notice interesting things going on – from people getting arrested, to celebrity sightings and news-worthy events. I tweet about these sort of things, but have always thought it would be nice to have something or someone to tweet these to, a common data source and place to go for this sort of information. That’s where @Spotd (twitter.com/spotd) comes in, it is an aggregated, user-submitted news feed for interesting things going on, specific to the city you live in - Chicago for now.

I, like many people, always want to be on top of things going on in Chicago (from the standpoint of locals) – this is the perfect way for people to stay updated on what’s going on, right now, in their city. This includes and is not limited to crime reports, breaking news, celebrity sightings, traffic incidents, etc. Best of all with the support of Twitpic users can get actual footage of things that are happening instead of waiting for the major news networks to get out and report on them.

The functionality is the same as the @tamaletracker system. Users tweet a reply to @spotd when they witness said arrests, celebrity sightings and news-worthy events. The system then will relay their message through the http://twitter.com/spotd user account.

In the next couple days(I hope) I am going to whip up a web page and some more descriptive text about the service and make it more extensible than the built in Twitter functionality. As of now I only created an account for Chicago, however this can easily be expanded in a manner of minutes.

I hope you can see the value in this as much as I do, if you'd like more information or have any suggestions, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks!

- Clint