DIYcity San Francisco

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

Hey DIY SF - posting these links in case you all aren't subscribed to the Discussions or Main group, and because well, they belong somewhere in the DIY San Francisco section. They are the San Francisco versions of DIYcity apps that have launched in the past couple of weeks, for your use, enjoyment, and improvement:

DIYtraffic for San Francisco: http://twitter.com/traffic_sf

SickCity for San Francisco: http://sickcity.org/USA/San%20Francisco

explanation/documentation for each at:

http://diycity.org/diytraffic-realtime-traffic-alerts

and

http://diycity.org/sickcity-realtime-disease-detection-your-city

Both of these apps are being improved on pretty quickly right now by a couple of folks. If you have suggestions, post 'em on the site.

More apps to come!

Hi there DIY San Francisco,

I don't know how many of you tune into the Discussions group on DIYcity, but an interesting conversation has emerged on creating a bottom-up pinging system for tracking bus locations in realtime and broadcasting those to others.

See beginning of conversation here:

http://diycity.org/discussions/diycity-challenge-3

...and continuation of conversation here:

http://diycity.org/discussions/mobile-phone-pinger-bottom-tracking-syste...

Seeing as I used to take the 5 Fulton to work every morning back in my SF days, I keep thinking we should test this system out there. (Knowing when that bus was coming in the morning would have saved me a lot of time and headaches).

I was thinking a limited test on a single bus line would be a good start.

Is anyone interested in this?

The first meeting of DIYcity San Francisco took place Wednesday January 14, 2009 at PariSoMa coworking space.

It was an exciting meetup; we introduced the core concepts behind DIYcity and went over a series of earlier "city hacks" that exemplify that sort of clever, fun bits of grassroots urban innovation that we aim to build upon and to empower others to build upon. About 35 people participated; most folks were somehow involved in the tech industry but we also had academics, an architect, and even founders of the most "DIY" city ever, Burning Man!

Notes from the meeting are here on the wiki; if you attended and would like to add to this or submit your own notes, please dig in:
http://www.diycity.org/wiki/index.php?title=SFmeeting1

Stay tuned; will be growing out the wiki in the coming weeks with a list of ideas for projects we can build out, a list of challenges to pursue, and a list of strong earlier "city hacks" to learn from.

–Sean

The first DIYcity SF meetup is a week away.

I expect much of this first event to be devoted to carving out what our goals are and how to tackle them.

We've been talking about three potential formats/directions to aim for with DIYcity SF meetups. What do you think? Which works best for you? Do you have other suggestions?

1- Open Foo- / Bar- camp style – The space is divided into a couple of presentation areas; anyone who wants to present signs up for a slot and describes their topic on a board up front; people read the board and attend the presentations/discussions they're most passionate about.

2– Devote the meetings to presentations of best practices and ideas. Each session will include 1-3 speakers who will present successful projects they're working on, or have completed, that fit into the DIYcity realm; or just demonstrating great things they admire that others have built and that we can learn from. After the presentations we can mingle with the speakers and one another to exchange contacts and ideas and to form new working teams.

3– Devote the meetings to brainstorming and defining. Each session would be devoted to a particular subject (a specific problem, neighborhood, technology, etc.) and we'd meet up to brainstorm ideas to improve life in the city along the lines of the theme. Participants would form teams that will build out the ideas after the meeting.

4– Devote meetings to building. Go into each session with at least a rough specification of a tool/service/solution/space that we've already defined, and build it out.

Chime in and let me know which of these directions (if any) you'd like to lean towards and that will help define our first meetup.

Thanks and happy new year

Sean

BART now offers open-format schedules, real-time arrival and ETA feeds, etc. for developers to hook into:
http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/index.aspx

(thx dens!)

[NOTE: The date has been changed since the original announcement, to January 14.]

Hi folks

We have a date and a free venue set up for the first DIYcity San Francisco meetup:
When: January 14, 2009, 6 pm-?
Where: PariSoMa coworking space, 1436A Howard Street (at 10th) in San Francisco

(We figured it would be best to kick it off after the holidays when more people are back in town.)

Please sign up at this Upcoming link so we know how many people to expect:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1403191/?ps=6

...and please spread the word!

Any ideas for specific topics to kick off with?

Thanks

Sean