A Little Update

Hello all of you out there on DIYcity. It's been a long time since I've written in, and I just wanted to give a quick update on things.

First: progress on the new site is speeding along, though predictably taking ten times longer than expected. The idea has evolved and evolved into something very new and different, and I think exciting. It feels like we're in the home stretch toward a launch now, but one never knows for sure.

Then: wow, the world really is changing fast, isn't it? It has been almost exactly one year since DIYcity was launched, and in that time we've seen DC, San Francisco, NYC, Vancouver and Toronto all open up data sets for their cities. I've talked with tech people in other cities who say they're preparing to go down the same road. I think we can expect things to start moving even faster in the next year. (Really makes the case for a new version of DIYcity, no?)

Here are a few events coming up in the next month around open data sets, in various cities around the world:

A NYC Open311 Dev Camp October 24th

A Toronto Open Data Lab November 2

A San Francisco Open Data Event on November 7.

That's a very partial list, just culled from things I'm planning to (hopefully) attend. If you know of other events I've missed, feel free to post them here.

Some other links here, to things I've written around the web lately:

- How Long is Your City's Tail? on O'Reilly Radar.

- Getting Beyond Hyperlocal on Urban Omnibus.

Finally: apologies for all of the spam that was going out on DIYcity until recently. I think the site somehow became the target of a massive, global spam network. I've clamped down on the freewheelin' anyone-can-post-at-any-time nature of DIYcity for a bit, until it calms down, then will hopefully remove the clamps again once the coast is clear.

That's all for now. More to come...