Our cities today are relics from a time before the Internet. Services and infrastructure, created and operated by the government, are centrally managed, non-participatory and closed. And while this was once the best (and only) way for cities to operate, today it leads to a system that is inefficient, increasingly expensive to maintain, and slow to change.

What is needed right now is a new type of city: a city that is like the Internet in its openness, participation, distributed nature and rapid, organic evolution - a city that is not centrally operated, but that is created, operated and improved upon by all - a DIY City.

This is the DIYcity Challenge: can we, working together, define and build a version 1.0 of the Do-It-Yourself City, a city that operates on open data flowing through decentralized, open source tools, that actively engages residents not only as users but as participants and owners of the system?

Can we build this not only for our own individual cities, but for cities everywhere? Can we build an open toolset that any city, anywhere in the world, can access, modify to suit their needs, and deploy on their own terms?

Can we build this in one year? In six months? In three months?

Shall we get started?

Hello DIY friends!

I’m excited to tell you about this year’s Conflux festival! Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography: the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather for four days to explore their urban environment.

We are now accepting project submissions via our website http://www.confluxfestival.org

Now in its 7th year, Conflux 2010 is based on themes of INVESTIGATION, ACTION and TRANSMISSION. Conflux proposals must be submitted by August 15 ($10 administrative fee). Check the FAQ for guidelines and details.

If you aren’t interested in submitting but would still like to be involved we always need volunteers so let me know if you can help with the festival in any way--also a good way to get into Conflux for free : )

For more info check out the conflux blog and follow @confluxfestival on twitter.

Please pass this info along to anyone who might be interested.

See you at Conflux!

Best/sincerely/love/peace,

Adele Balderston
Assistant Director / Conflux Festival
Confluxfestival.org
heyadele[dot]com / [at]gmail

hey everyone!

I don't mean to spam the list but I got my links wrong in my first post.

The Open Call for World Maker Faire is real, and here are the real links:

Open Call for makers - World Maker Faire NYC

PDF flyer for Open Call for makers

refer here to my original post for details

thanks to Dave for pointing out my mistake, and I really look forward to seeing your Maker projects!

cheers, Nick Normal

greeting DIYcity users!

my name is Nick Normal and I'm an artist, maker and educator based in Long Island City, Queens, NY.

I wanted to let everyone on this list know that Maker Faire is coming to New York City - and by extension the East Coast! - for the first time later this year, on September 25th and 26th. There's currently an open call for Makers to submit proposals - the deadline is August 15th.

Maker Faire is the world's largest DIY festival - a blend of Art, Technology and Science, combined with family-fun, participation, robots, craft and do-it-yourself ethics.

I'm helping recruit Makers and we're looking for projects involving open-source code, robots, DIY makers, engine-hacks, solder fiends, hobbyists and enthusiasts, fixer-uppers, food makers, etc.

if you DIY we want you involved!

Here's the link to the open call:
World Maker Faire NYC Open Call

or if you have any questions, comments or conerns you can contact me. My email and phone are below. I look forward to hearing from all you Do It Yourselfers!

Nick Normal
artist, maker, librarian, diplomat
917.225.7032 (mobile)
nicknormal@gmail.com (email, gchat, etc.)

Hi DIY NYC - this email came in this morning from a list I'm on, thought I'd pass it along since it so directly relates to DIYcity topics.

It's great to see NYC's city departments really throwing themselves into this sort of thing, nearly two years after we started talking about it here.

If anyone is interested, pls get in touch with nfreeman - at- dot.nyc.gov.

--------

Hello Developers!

The New York City Department of Transportation needs your help! We want to provide more and more useful information to the traveling public about traffic and transportation. We know we’ve got a lot of the raw data, we need you to help us separate the wheat from the chaff.

Here at the DOT we’re plugged into all of the comings and goings of the city - we’re constantly monitoring highways, ferries, traffic cameras, bridges and road work. This means that we create a ton of data, some of which we share publically on our data feeds page. However, most of our data isn’t currently public.

There are many reasons why you (outside of the walls of government bureaucracy) will be able to build better apps, at ten times the speed and efficiency than we will ever be able to. We see our role as opening up and cleaning up our data to make it easier for you. Together we can provide the public with the information they hunger for, to make better decisions about how to move around the City.

To get started on this, we need your help to identify where the hot spots of demand are, so we can prioritize where direct our efforts to format and open up data. We also need you to help us start assessing where the gaps are between the data we have and the data we’d need to create truly useful “real-time traffic” apps. We’re at the beginning of this process, and the first step is to have an informal brainstorming meetup with developers. We’ll talk about some of the data feeds that we have, and hopefully you’ll come with some questions we haven’t asked yet.
We’ll be hosting the Brainstorming Meetup at DOT on July 21, 2010 from 9:30 – 11 am.

Invitation is open to anyone who wants to help improve the way DOT shares information, so pass it on. Space is limited, so please RSVP by July 15 to nfreeman - at- dot.nyc.gov.

Hi DIYcity!

Breaking radio silence here to announce that Appify beta is now up and live. (And getting to beta only took, uh... six months!) You on DIYcity are the first people we're telling about it.

Please check it out: http://appify.com

What you will find there: a site that bears almost no resemblance to the original alpha we previewed back in January, but one that is, I believe, much stronger and much closer in spirit to DIYcity, in that it is an open platform for discussion about all things. (All things app-related that is.) And like DIYcity, the idea is that by providing a place where open conversation can happen, people can point out interesting things to each other and innovation can be accelerated.

Here are some links to some short blog posts we've put up, explaining the idea behind the site:

Appify is an experiment in spreading information about new technology.

"Hey I thought Appify was a site about local apps?"

Question: Why did you make Appify about asking and answering questions?

You can follow all of the blog posts at blog.appify.com.

What's there today is just the absolute bare bones of what we want to do with it, so please keep that in mind - we'll be adding to it as quickly as we can, allowing people to converse more, find friends and topics that interest them more easily, etc. But this is the starting point, which is why we're launching it today.

Anyway, please check it out, try it out, tweet it, blog it, write an article about it if that's the kind of thing you do.

And enjoy it. I think it's really fun to use, so approach it like that.

John

p.s. here are a few DIYcity-related questions I posted to the site, which I personally would love some answers to.

What are the best do-it-yourself city infrastructure apps?

best app making use of open gov data?

what's your favorite app for NYC?

Are you located in the Sacramento, Yolo, or Solano County areas and interested in Open Government?

If so, please get in touch.

I'd like to connect with people interested in improving government, through transparency and civic engagement.

I'm currently working a project called "Democracy Map", which is designed to be an open database (with API) for all government agencies and eventually public officials that developers can contribute to and build upon to provide hyperlocal public content.

There is an open conference call on May 3rd at 11am via Skype, and all feedback is more than welcome.

Ryan Wold
rwold@morequality.org

Hi DIYcity,

Long time no talk!

This email came to me this morning via the ITP Alumni List and I found it interesting so I thought I'd pass it along. I don't want to paste the author's email live to the site, so if you're interested get in touch with me and I'll put you in touch.

John

Hello current (and past) ITP students:

I'm looking for some beta testers for my iPhone data logger application. I'm specifically soliciting bicycle riders to record their rides around New York City in support of my thesis research involving visualizing the cyclist experience. This is a proof-of-concept exploration in what a ubiquitous mobile sensor network could possibly look like, using existing technology that we already carry to learn about ourselves and our world.

I've chosen to focus on cycling in the city, but the concept is far-reaching (and I'm certainly not the first to approach this). Recently, The New York Times published an article[1] revealing findings from a year of GPS logged taxi cab data, summarizing average traffic speeds in Manhattan by day. Similarly, Cabspotting[2] visualized the taxi routes in San Francisco. Flight Patterns[3] reveals the air traffic over the United States throughout a typical day.

Similarly, projects involving using the bicycle as a sensing platform have emerged as well. The Copenhagen Wheel[4] is a dense array of motion and environmental sensors packed into an electric-assist rear hub. While not cycling-specific, the Personal Environmental Impact Report[5] uses GPS-enabled mobile phones to infer mode of travel from speed and calculate your carbon footprint and exposure to air pollution.

I'm specifically looking to see correlations in rider travel patterns. Are there commonalities in routes, sound levels, bumps? How are riders navigating to similar locations? What are typical trip durations and speeds? Do different types of riders (commuter, enthusiast, courier, racer, delivery rider) behave differently? When are riders on the roads? For all of this, what could it look like as visualization?

This application is the data collection mechanism I've chosen to employ for this exploration. It records location, heading, speed, altitude, accelerometer, sound level, trip duration and distance to storage on the device. Each log can be viewed on a map and individual samples inspected. Export logs via e-mail in CSV, JSON or Golden Cheetah format. Data can be automatically uploaded while recording as well.

This application will be released as open source software under the GPLv3. Source code will be available at: http://github.com/rcarlsen/Mobile-Logger

If you'd like to participate in this beta test, please e-mail me the UUID for your iPhone (3G or 3GS, OS 3.1+) device. This can be retrieved in iTunes by connecting the iPhone via USB cable, and clicking on the Serial Number field in the device summary. After displaying the UUID, go to Edit > Copy to copy it to the clipboard.

Thank you,
Robert

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/nyregion/24traffic.html?ref=nyregion
[2] http://cabspotting.org/
[3] http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/
[4] http://senseable.mit.edu/copenhagenwheel/
[5] http://peir.cens.ucla.edu/

From Open Government to Open Communities

Join us for an open conversation on local online civic engagement as we share our ideas for building on open government toward more participatory and open communities.

* Who: You. Join Steven Clift, with E-Democracy.org who is leading the Ford Foundation-funded Participation 3.0 effort.

* What: Participation 3.0 - http://e-democracy.org/p3

* When: 10-11:30 a.m., Monday, March 29, 2010

* Where: Idealist.org, 302 Fifth Ave, 11th Floor

RSVP Not Required, but appreciated:
clift@e-democracy.org

I look forward to connecting with old friends and meeting new people interested in open government, transparency, participation, community building, and more.

Since my work in the "e-democracy" space goes back 15+ years, those new to these issues might find these articles to be of interest - http://stevenclift.com - and this network - http://dowire.org - to be of value.

Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy New Tel: +1.612.234.7072

Hey Everybody!

In the vein of Do-It-Yourself projects and community improvement, I think that the workshop series we are starting at the Green Institute will be great in educating homeowners and businesses about simple and practical ways to save energy.

Coming up we have:

REUSE-ENERGY WORKSHOP ON WINDOW REHABBING ON MARCH 4!

This workshop will help homeowners choose the right option for improving the performance of their windows. Window restoration specialist Paul Schmidt of Twin Cities-based Restoration Window Systems will cover temporary or permanent fixes to reduce heat loss and air infiltration on existing windows, reversing the effects of deterioration on historic wood windows and making an appropriate window replacement. Mark your calendars for Thursday, March 4 from 6:30 - 8 PM at 2801 21st Avenue South, Minneapolis. RSVP to Agatha Vaaler (avaaler@greeninstitute.org 612.278.7142 ). Cost is $15, which can be paid at the door or in advance. Refreshments will be provided.

Hope you check it out!

www.greeninstitute.org