New York City

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

I had an idea over the weekend for an app that would allow people who wanted to share the cost of a taxi together to find each other in a city. This would be a very straightforward app to build, no? Match up people for starting point and destination point, along with time of departure. Make it a system that operates on the fly, people can look for a taxi share just a few minutes before their departure.

Could work well in cities at night, when mass amounts of people are leaving bars, restaurants, clubs, etc in nightlife areas and heading to residential areas. And for that matter, could work well the other way too, when mass amounts of people are leaving residential areas and heading to the restaurant, bar & club areas.

You could approach the safety issue in various ways if you wanted. Wont go into that here.

It's kind of like Dodgeball, but for after you leave the bar.

Could be very useful, money-saving to individuals, and could cut the # of solo taxi rides out there.

I am imagining a mobile app that lets you walk around NYC, and letting your device use your location, display zoning information for the building lot(s) at the address or location.

Developers already walk around the city, investigating under-developed sites and (when the market is right) calculating total square footage allowed under zoning.

I don't know if zoning information has been coded with addresses in any public data source.

But this could be useful for a lot of people. Would be interested to hear from local NYC tech folks who might have thought any of this through?

It somehow feels like a new world out there today, so it's fitting DIYcity has its first user-submitted app! Traffictweet, created by Andy Weissman, is a twitter bot that lets people broadcast current traffic conditions to others listening in. Subscribe to it, broadcast messages about traffic, and receive messages sent by others.

Nice.

The app is pretty general of course. It would be useful to have different twitter feeds set up for different cities, for starters, and then you could segment it further several different ways to minimize noise to users. Still, this is a great first step for trying out and moving forward with. Kudos to Andy.

I just subscribed to the feed and am going to start playing around with it. If you're interested, you should do the same.

Or else take the idea one step further and build something better.

Hi,

We're hoping to have our first meetup for DIY New York City in the next couple of weeks.

If anyone has a meeting space to volunteer, get in touch.

Also, feel free to propose topics to focus on in the first meeting. We have some idea of the direction we think things should take, given who it seems will be in attendance, but anyone who wants to propose ideas of their own should do so.

More soon.