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?

Hi DIYcity

The City of SF has undertaken an experiment to develop an open source platform with the community that will help improve public access to raw government data in machine readable formats. We see a great opportunity to work with other cities and developers in creating technology that is re-usable, free and open source to solve a common challenge. As members of DIYcity, this might be of interest.

You can learn more at our wiki and if you’re technically inclined check out our documentation. Our next open meeting is 7/2 @17:00 PDT dial in: 219-509-8111 [252380#]

http://apps.sfgov.org/opendata
http://apps.sfgov.org/opendata/index.php/Documentation

Jay Nath
jay [dot] nath (at)sfgov[dot]org

Hi DIY SF

The City of SF has undertaken an experiment to develop an open source platform with the community that will help improve public access to raw government data in machine readable formats. We see a great opportunity to work with other cities and developers in creating technology that is re-usable, free and open source to solve a common challenge. As members of DIY SF, I’m writing to you to see if there is any interest in this initiative.

You can learn more at our wiki and if you’re technically inclined check out our documentation. Our next open meeting is 7/2 @17:00 PDT dial in: 219-509-8111 [252380#]

http://apps.sfgov.org/opendata
http://apps.sfgov.org/opendata/index.php/Documentation

Jay Nath
jay [dot] nath (at)sfgov[dot]org

Hi all,

Come join us for a meetup to solicit ideas, interest, participants and planners in the upcoming Breakout! Festival on July 1 at 6:45pm at New Work City (200 Varick Street, Suite 507b).

This summer the BREAKOUT! Festival will return creative work to the
streets of New York. Using coworking as a model, and injecting
lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban
public spaces, BREAKOUT! will explore new and productive niches for
working outside of traditional office buildings. BREAKOUT! seeks to
create a new architecture for the creative city by appropriating
public spaces for the collaborative knowledge work that drives the
contemporary city.

This meetup gathers together fans, volunteers, and planners interested
in helping make outdoor coworking and the BREAKOUT! Festival a
success.

The Agenda? Discuss:
* the upcoming New York Festival (September 18th - October 30th)
* ideas for facilitating breakout sessions
* cool things needed for breakouts
* how to participate in a breakout
* how to do more

Please RSVP here:
http://www.meetup.com/BreakoutNow/calendar/10729904/

Website: http://www.breakoutfestival.org/

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Elysse

Hey DIY New Yorkers, if you're in the city and you have a free hour at lunchtime today, think about swinging by the discussion on "open data standards" being held by the New York City Council Committee on Technology in Government. Here are the details:

This bill will come before the Technology in Government Committee on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 1:00pm at 250 Broadway, 14th Floor Hearing Room, NY NY 10007.

Meeting should go for 2 hours, or until 3 PM.

Unfortunately I'm way up at Columbus Circle at the Personal Democracy Forum all day, don't think I'm going to be able to make it all the way down there for the meeting. But it sounds like a pretty important one - if you're interested in open data in NYC, please drop by and give them some input.

And if you go, *please* post notes to DIY NYC afterwards.

If you've been following the posts on DIYcity, you may have sensed recently that we've been in a sort of holding pattern. Launches of a couple of products in the spring and a flurry of activity around various ideas were followed by questions of how to make all of this work worthwhile to the people doing it, and how to sustain that work once people's initial enthusiasm for it has leveled off. As this happened production on DIYcity came to a standstill, and the site has been functioning as a sort of bulletin board for announcements about DIY-type developments ever since.

While this has gone on, I've been thinking and thinking about what shape DIYcity should take in order to address those questions of making work worthwhile and keeping the work going. I've been bouncing ideas and questions off of my growing list of brilliant advisors. I've been thinking about what the next stage of DIYcity is going to be, exactly.

With help from those advisors, I've finally got the plan. And it's good. It's exciting. I think it could become the most interesting thing I've ever worked on.

So the plan is there, ready to go. There are just a few (financial) matters to attend to before we can put it into action.

I'm going to start preparing for this new phase of DIYcity immediately behind the scenes, and just figure that the still-open stuff will work itself out by the time I'm done preparing. Then we'll get on to that next stage for DIYcity.

Until then, there may be a bit more of a holding pattern. We'll try to make that as interesting as possible for everyone, and hopefully it wont last too long.

I've been watching the discussion trying to figure out the DIY City's wavelength.

I think part of what we see emerging on the local (neighborhood) Issues Forums hosted by E-Democracy.Org fit your model of citizen problem-solving. My experience is that at the very very very local level people will pick shovels and do stuff, while up the chain people prefer their tax dollars to do the work so they don't have to be bothered.

On my local neighborhood Issues Forum - http://e-democracy.org/se - we've had people start community garden efforts, ask if people want to do a blood drive and then promote it, suggest and then organize a volunteer lake clean-up (only to run into trouble getting connected to the right person in the parks department for permission), buy flower bulbs in bulk for their homes with some left over for public space, etc. Recently, a mugging at a new local light rail stop generated a flurry of activity: http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/355

Anyway, since a number of you will be at Participation Camp, I thought I should say hello. If any of you would like to talk neighborhoods online to gather tips from 15 years on the front lines of e-participation, check out the two sessions I'll be leading or virtually note - http://e-democracy.org/if - for an existing Webinar and some links here: http://pages.e-democracy.org/Social_media_in_local_public_life

Cheers,
Steven Clift
http://stevenclift.com - A personal intro
Executive Director, E-Democracy.Org
http://twitter.com/democracy

Hi DIY City,
You can skip the first paragraph I'm sure, but check out what's happening at PCamp with open data.
Best,
Matt

-----

Dear Fans of Transparency and Participation,

In recent weeks, several organizations in New York have taken big steps towards making New York City's public data accessible and useful to software developers. There's still a lot of work to be done, but the end of the story could be a wealth of new ways that citizens will be able to effectively and efficiently participate in the governance of their city. Several of those groups will be getting the ball rolling at this weekend's Participation Camp, an open and free unconference on citizen participation in government.

Register now to reserve your spot and stay up-to-date: http://participationcamp.org

Here's what's happening:
GALE A. BREWER, NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL

As Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government, Councilmember Brewer recently proposed comprehensive legislation for making New York City’s public data accessible and machine readable. She will host a discussion at Participation Camp on Saturday at 2:30 pm to discuss this legislation and get feedback from the open government community and interested citizens.

The bill, Introduction No. 991, can be read in full here.
OPEN 311 CODE SPRINT

Throughout PCamp, ITP’s workshop space will be open to collaboration on open government Internet applications. On Saturday, we’ll hold a sprint focused on Open 311: an initiative to make municipal data more readily available to programmers who want to make useful applications. Philip Ashlock from The Open Planning Project will help coordinate development of Open 311 related projects in conjunction with Open311.org. Peter Corbett, organizer of Washington D.C.’s ongoing Apps for Democracy Contest, will provide direction and best practices based on D.C.’s Open 311 API. We also encourage contestants of Apps for Democracy to work together at PCamp, as their July 1st deadline approaches. On Sunday, the workshop will remain open for any projects that grow out of Saturday’s efforts and the camp in general.
MARK BELINSKY, OPENMYCITY

Mark serves as director of Digital Democracy, but at PCamp he will lead a session on the OpenMyCity project. The goal of OpenMyCity is to find the best ideas about how to make use of municipal open data by asking citizens and organizations to answer a simple fill-in-the-blank question: “If I knew ___, I could do ___.”

OpenMyCity is backed by a coalition that formed around the Pioneers conference that took place recently in New York and Amsterdam. At PCamp, Mark will lead a workshop to build a plan for capturing as many stories as possible. This effort provides a human component to the technological and legislative efforts already happening around municipal data.

Cityleft has worked together with Travelsharing.netsons.org to develop an open source website for car pooling.

Carpooling (also known as car-sharing, ride-sharing, lift-sharing and covoiturage), is the shared use of a car by the driver and one or more passengers, usually for commuting (Wikipedia).

However Travelsharing.netsons.org extended this approach to other forms of mobility such as biking, hiking, and so on.

The website is still at its beta version. Users should join to the community in order to translate contents in local languages.

To take part to this Travelsharing.netsons.org project visit:
www.Travelsharing.netsons.org

Cityleft

From the Open Gov google group:

from Sam Wong
reply-to open-government@googlegroups.com
date Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 3:02 PM
subject [open-gov] Open Data Standards - New York Council

The New York City Council Committee on Technology in Government will be holding an important hearing on open data standards for all city agencies on June 29th at 250 Broadway (across the street from City Hall). This bill, Introduction 991 (available here: http://webdocs.nyccouncil.info/textfiles/Int%200991-2009.htm?CFID=251408...), is an effort to increase government transparency and access to public data.

The bill will require the City to create a centralized online repository of all publicly available information that is either produced or retained by the City. Furthermore, data published under this legislation will be done so in a format that will be readable by any computer device, whether that is a laptop or a phone. Not only will this collection of information be invaluable to elected officials, other government agencies and public advocates, but it can also be used by private citizens who could use the information in ingenious and unforeseen ways. Together, we believe these aspects will create a level of openness and accountability in Government unmatched by any city or State in the country.

This effort is inspired in part by both as an enhancement to processes already taking place within New York, and to parallel President Obama’s initiatives to incorporate open access to data normally not available in centralized databases, such as www.data.gov and www.recovery.gov. Introduction 991 could create a nycdata.gov, creating a new model for access, mobility and interactivity to a wide range of “data” on the local level. Data can be geolinked to already existing CityMap 2.0, a project started by New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) that provides a one-stop shop and user-friendly map to provide a vast array of information for New Yorkers. Just imagine looking a restaurant’s ratings (and violations) on your computer or mobile device based on your search or GPS location. Furthermore, one could access a building’s permits or violations with mobile applications built off of existing Dept. of Buildings data. On the academic side, student researchers can research various legislation and statistics instantly. Open access to information ensures government accountability to provide the most detailed and user-friendly data format, while maintaining user privacy. Furthermore, we are seeking comments from web developers and webmasters on this bill, as they can provide some insight on the process and difficulties we might experience.

This bill will come before the Technology in Government Committee on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 1:00pm at 250 Broadway, 14th Floor Hearing Room, NY NY 10007. Unfortunately, this hearing falls on the same day as Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej’s Personal Democracy Forum conference due to some unforeseen scheduling delays during the Council’s budget season. However, we are looking for members of the digital community to join us for 1-2 hours next Monday and help demonstrate support for the benefits of this legislation (The hearing occurs during the PdF Networking Lunch and should not last beyond 3 PM).

Please contact Kunal Malhotra [kmalhotra@council.nyc.gov], Director of Legislation and Budget, or Samuel Wong [samwong.529@gmail.com], Legislative Aide on Technology, if you want to attend the hearing and/or testify at this hearing. Our City Hall office number is (212)
788-6975.

We look forward to your participation.