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!)

For those of you not listening in on the Discussions group, I wanted to point you to yesterday's post from DIYcity member Jordan:

Hi all,

I put together a quick web service for querying zoning/land use information in New York City over the weekend. You can either pass a street address or longitude/latitude pair and it will return data for the 10 closest tax lots as an XML document. (And if you pass a street address, it will attempt to match the address on the PLUTO record and send that as the first record.)

Read his full post here.

Excellent, nice work Jordan.

Seth Godin recently posted about an Iphone application idea he had:
"Have the iPhone use the gps data... upload where I was a minute ago and where I am now. Figure out my speed and route. Use the data to tell other RadaR users which route is best."

You can read the full post here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/an-iphone-app-t.html

We're really excited about the potential for this app and what all of you here at DIYcity can do to make it come to life.

Cheers,

Chris Allison

I want to build an application that makes it ultra-easy for people to find or share rides with others, one that works and that people will use.

It should be an app that is specific to a particular location, but that can be adopted in cities everywhere with a few tweaks.

I think this is pretty feasible to build. Slightly challenging, but definitely doable.

I will pay for any costs incurred in the building and hosting of this app. Unless of course some charitable organization wants to donate resources. (If you are an organization that would like to do this, please get in touch).

I will post more details on the app, as I see it, in a separate post within this thread.

I was writing up these notes to a journalist who was interested in DIYcity, and I thought I'd share them with everyone on the site. Just a little bit on where we are and where we may be going.

Who We Are

First of all, DIYcity is still brand-new, just a few weeks old now. In that time, we've been joined by people from all over the world. Folks have started up groups in cities as diverse as São Paulo, Copenhagen, Portland Oregon, and Kuala Lumpur. Individuals in states like Florida, Illinois, Texas, and in countries like Mexico, Italy and Sweden have joined the site. Our incoming traffic shows an amazingly equal distribution over the world map.

And the people that are joining are an impressive lot. Computer programmers, designers, sustainability thinkers, urban planners, college professors, high-ranking members of city agencies, to name a few. There is a lot of skill and knowledge represented by this group.

In all, DIYcity in a few short weeks has grown into a mass of people from everywhere in the world interested in changing their local areas for the better in an intelligent way. And we can expect that growth to continue into the future.

What's Working

So, what's working and what's not working?

lots of public records here, not sure if there's an API or not

Hey all, really great news: you can now take part in conversations on DIYcity directly from your email account, without having to come to the site.

Yup, that's right - DIYcity works like an actual listserv now.

When you get an incoming email from DIYcity, if you want to comment, just hit 'reply', type your message and send it. That comment will show up on the site beneath the original post, and go out to everyone else on the list as an email. People receiving that message can then reply to it via email as well.

You never actually have to come to the site to be a part of the conversation.

For it to work correctly, you have to send your email from the address you signed up for DIYcity with.

Try it out!

Thanks to Brett in Mexico City and his associates in Europe for pulling this together.

Also, if you haven't yet, sign up for the Discussions group to be in on the discussions there...

I am imagining a mobile app that lets you walk around NYC, and letting your device use your location, display zoning information for the building lot(s) at the address or location.

Developers already walk around the city, investigating under-developed sites and (when the market is right) calculating total square footage allowed under zoning.

I don't know if zoning information has been coded with addresses in any public data source.

But this could be useful for a lot of people. Would be interested to hear from local NYC tech folks who might have thought any of this through?

I live in the Bible Belt, Texas to be specific. I live in College Station (home of Texas A&M University- great at engineering and some other sciences), but College Station isn't as large as some of the other cities here on DIYcity so I've had a tough time thinking of any traffic related issues. However, it is big enough to notice a giant leap in traffic on Sundays when church gets out- I think the development of twitter bots for various cities in the Bible Belt could definitely be useful. Basically you setup a way for churches to signal the bot that their service is over, thereby letting everyone following the bot know that traffic is about to spike.

Today we're launching a new group on DIYcity, Discussions. The Discussions group is a place where everyone can:

- pose a question or problem to others that needs addressing

- offer ideas for ways to address a problem

- iterate on / improve others ideas

- meet others who are interested in the same problems or in the same solutions to these problems as you.

The Discussions group takes the idea of DIYcity Challenges and moves it out of the realm of building apps, and into the realm of discussion, debate and idea sharing. This should allow us to iterate on ideas and arrive at better models more quickly and easily than by asking people to actually build and submit completed apps in response to challenges.

The ideas that come out of the Discussions group will then help direct DIYcity meetups, as well as guide future DIYcity Challenges.

The Discussions group is meant to be very chatty - everyone who joins should feel comfortable posting and receiving posts frequently. All ideas are welcome, you don't need to be an expert to post.

Please join the discussion! http://diycity.org/group/discussions