mobile apps

You can now check on subway updates by sending "txtnyc" (space) "subup" to 368-638. There is no need for any kind of registration or fancy-phone.

They are the most recent updates I'm aware of (test it yourself, I have) and the fastest/most convenient way to access it.

DIYcity folks,

Work with us to take our Placemaking processes and tools online. After the imminent re-launch of our website, we are looking at developing web 2.0 and 3.0 applications to support community-driven, place-based planning efforts.

The Job Description:
http://www.pps.org/info/aboutpps/jobopenings

Ethan

Ethan Kent
Vice President

Project for Public Spaces
700 Broadway New York, NY 10003
T (212) 620-5660 x 318 F (212) 620-3821
http://www.pps.org

Reposted announcement from Philip Ashlock, The Open Planning Project:

I'd like to invite you to take part in the initiative to bring cities together in the pursuit of sharing technology and standards for 311 services. Please forward this to other interested parties.

http://open311.org/2009/09/announcing-open311-devcamp/

To attend or see the current list of attendees including other cities: http://open311.eventbrite.com/ (So far the 311 teams from NYC, D.C., Toronto, Columbus, and other cities are attending)

On October 24th, The Open Planning Project will host Open311 DevCamp at their NYC office. Please register to attend either in person or remotely via Eventbrite (it’s free). This is a DevCamp style un-conference to coordinate a standard specification for 311 services. Washington D.C’s 311 API will be a major case-study for developing a more universal 311 API. In general, this DevCamp will be an opportunity to discuss and develop what’s needed to make 311 services more accessible and for cities to share knowledge for mutual benefit. The event is intended for developers, project managers, and policy makers involved with 311 services. We encourage those involved with 311 services from all cities to take part. If you cannot attend in person, please sign up as a remote attendee and we’ll provide you with information about how to connect to the DevCamp remotely.

Please register at http://open311.eventbrite.com
The wiki page for the event is http://wiki.open311.org/Open311DevCamp

Ultimately this conversation will lead to a standard specification for 311 services, but the very first goal is to create an environment for knowledge-sharing and best practices.

On the same day there will another event in NYC that focuses on coordinating open technology for mobile devices and we plan to coordinate with that event as well: http://openmobilecamp.eventbrite.com/

I hope you can be involved or can forward this to the most relevant person in your city. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Philip Ashlock
--

Philip Ashlock
The Open Planning Project - http://www.openplans.org
phil@openplans.org | @philipashlock | (360) 389-2741

Hi all,
I just recently discovered DIYcity and am fascinated by the forward-thinking nature of this endeavor. As a planner and web developer it's right up my alley.

We have recently been kicking around some ideas about how to truly mobilize Twitter, to use it outside, on streets, in parks and in venues - accessible for anyone, not just the Twitter "elite". Beyond some of the obvious uses of Twitter, it's a great exchange format, merging information from both humans and machines in a very straightforward way.
Anyways, I don't want to go into much detail, since that's probably all old news for everyone here. We have put together a prototype that basically allows anyone to request the most recent tweets and link to more via text message. It works for both, Twitter accounts and hashtags, and anyone can post to hashtags via text message, if they are not on Twitter. In addition, we're playing with various sticker formats, to encourage interaction outside, on site. And that's where DIYcity comes in.
We'd love to brainstorm and test some use cases and some of the ideas discussed here seem perfect. As a start, some of our ideas include:

- Mobile dialogue in parks, squares, etc.: Use a hashtag as "discussion forum", to post safety issues ("6'5, bald guy with green shirt just stole my purse"), to fun stuff ("Need 2 more players for our volleyball game, come to xyz"), weather alerts, lost and found, etc.
- Mobilize announcements from delays, to parking spots (http://twitter.com/BoulderParking), to city infos (http://twitter.com/iknowdenver) and make them accessible beyond Twitter's user base.
- More advanced concepts of the mobile city (http://www.planetizen.com/node/39717)... again, going beyond the Twitter user base.
As I said, we have a prototype to play with at http://GuerrillaTweets.com and would love to get feedback, discuss the concept and assumptions and hopefully get some of you interested to play with it or collaborate.

Cheers,
Chris

http://eParticipation.com
http://twitter.com/challer

My name is Alec Resnick, and I'm working to start up an open community research and education lab with a focus on educational outreach and data visualization called sprout. You can check out a placeholder page at http://thesprouts.org -- that'll be changing pretty significantly in the next couple weeks.

But, that's kinda beside the point of this email. While talking to some potential partners for the nonprofit I'm starting, I met with some people at the Executive Office of Transportation (EOT) in Boston. They're really keen to bring together a handful of developers who might be interested in working with them to develop applications on top of the data they're beginning to collect and open up (stuff like traffic cams, traffic flow, MBTA schedules, etc.) A few other hackers will be getting together with the Josh Robin and Chris Dempsey from the EOT to talk about what developers would like to see from the EOT and to discuss the potential for hacking on the data the EOT is opening up.

If you're interested, feel free to comment here or shoot me an email at alec::at::thesprouts.org. The EOT was hoping to meet with developers sometime next week, but they're flexible. . .

Following yesterday's presentation and working group session with the City's IT Manager at OpenWebVancouver09, Luke Closs has setup a Google Group specifically focused on the Open Data component of Andrea Reimer's "Open Data, Open Standards, Open Source" motion.

You can join the group at http://groups.google.ca/group/vancouver-data/

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

HeavyMeta, you blocked comments on your posts, or i would have put this there.... i know its obviously the most appropriate venue,.... this was second best

regarding your post, "thingfinding application", i think its a great idea... check out http://ourfaves.com/ as a model... its a great site, but underutilized.... maybe a good starting point to work from.

I've been meaning for a while to post an invitation to everyone to work together on the mobile phone pinging system that has been discussed on the site as an alternative to expensive centralized bus tracking systems going in to some cities.

This seems like it would be really easy and straightforward to build, especially the way roygbiv approaches it in that thread linked to above.

If anyone is interested in figuring this out and getting it built, send an email to diy@diycity.org and we'll get going on it.

Hey all -

You may have seen on the main thread that the DIYtraffic Bot is up and running in beta and we've got it tracking traffic right here in Chicago!

There are a couple ways you can interact with it:
1) follow traffic_chicago on Twitter to receive real-time updates (to your mobile phone, if you wish)
2) send a reply to @traffic_chicago to post your own traffic info if you see an accident or jam (no texting and driving, 'natch)
3) send the account a direct message with the name of a street to find out if there have been any recent traffic reports containing that street name (note, if you follow traffic_chicago, it will take about 30m for it to follow you back so you can send DMs to it).

Let me know if you have any problems / questions / comments or suggestions!

Dan