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/

Here are links to some posts in various groups this week, summarized for those of you in the Main Group:

In DIY Chicago: DIYcity Chicago Get-Together (old thread with new life)

In Discussions: Outlining a DIYcity 1.0

In DIY Vancouver: Tool Lending Library

In DIY Atlanta: Atlanta Crime Report

In Discussions: A DIYcity 1.0 Framework

-j.

I'm still thinking about the notion of a "user interface for cities and their residents", and thinking about what the key components of a 1.0 of such a system would be. This is, after all, what we've set out in some small way to work toward - a general user interface for cities everywhere, that residents of those cities can plug into. Maybe working toward that just means outlining what the main components are, maybe it means pointing to instances of it in each city, and maybe it means building it ourselves. Or maybe it is some combination of those three things.

At any rate, following up on Tuesday's post about outlining a DIYcity 1.0, I'm taking the very simple, conceptual step of taking those services I was talking about and thinking of them explicitly in terms of DIY:

DIY Transportation
DIY Police Services
DIY Emergency Care
DIY Public Health
DIY Waste Management

...plus:

DIY Education (added by nickyg)

and a few others:

DIY Resource Location
DIY Alt Transportation (bikes etc)
DIY Citizen Coordination

and I'm thinking of these as top-level categories for possible DIY applications.

Inside those categories of course you could fit hundreds of individual apps. And we will, eventually. But if we start by outlining the top-level categories for a user interface for cities, then we can start to think more clearly about what a 1.0 interface should include. Or rather what it needs to include.

(I left off of this list a lot of services that I think are not innately DIY-friendly: Fire service for instance. If you think I'm wrong to leave these things out of the framework for a DIYcity 1.0, let me know.)

So that's where I am today: with a rough outline of a framework for a DIYcity 1.0, a user interface for cities. That will get codified somewhat into the site itself going forward, and we will begin to formulate ideas around these.

I still feel like this is an incomplete list. I've gotten a few good responses from people off-list about this. If you have any other ideas on this, please send em my way.

Another post to a local group (DIY Atlanta, which has only one member currently) that I wanted to share with the Discussions group:

(quote)
James Charlesworth at Neboweb in Atlanta, GA built this site for people living in Atlanta. The site is a great step towards open information in the area and will help locals identify crime history by neighborhood. The site is:

http://www.atlantacrimereport.org/
(end quote)

atlantacrimereport looks very cool.

original post here: http://diycity.org/atlanta/atlanta-crime-report

Reposting this to Discussions from the DIY Vancouver Group. Seems like a cool idea, wanted everyone to see it, not just the people in Vancouver:

(quote)
Hello, I'm Jared Bachynski. I came across this site from a recent David Eaves blog post, and thought I'd mention an something that I would love to see implemented in Vancouver: a Tool Lending Library.

See here for Berkeley's implementation of the concept:

http://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/about_the_library/neighborhood_bran...

Naturally, this is taking the DIY of DIYcity a little too literally; worthwhile enough to mention, nevertheless.
(end quote)

I don't think that's taking the DIY of DIYcity too literally at all. I don't think there's any such thing as taking the DIY too literally - question is more "how literally can you take it?

Original post here:

http://diycity.org/diy-vancouver/tool-lending-library

James Charlesworth at Neboweb in Atlanta, GA built this site for people living in Atlanta. The site is a great step towards open information in the area and will help locals identify crime history by neighborhood. The site is:
http://www.atlantacrimereport.org/

Hello, I'm Jared Bachynski. I came across this site from a recent David Eaves blog post, and thought I'd mention an something that I would love to see implemented in Vancouver: a Tool Lending Library.

See here for Berkeley's implementation of the concept:

http://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/about_the_library/neighborhood_bran...

Naturally, this is taking the DIY of DIYcity a little too literally; worthwhile enough to mention, nevertheless.

Hey, I think Melissa has uncovered a new bug on DIYcity.

Sorry all - will get this closed in the next round of bug fixes, hopefully before an out-of-office cascade happens on the list.

On the plus side, nice to see the City of Perth is active on DIYcity!

"I will be out of the office starting 11/06/2009 and will not return until 22/06/2009."

As I was preparing a presentation on DIYcity recently, I started thinking about the idea of a "do-it-yourself city", a city that tunes into its own data to create services and tools for residents without relying on government, and without needing big budgets to sustain itself. What would such a city look like? What services commonly offered by cities are things that could be extended, improved, even replaced entirely with a Do-It-Yourself framework? What would a 1.0 version of a DIY City look like?

In the process of thinking about this I visited Wikipedia's page on Public Services. Their list of public services includes:

Broadcasting
Education
Electricity
Fire service
Gas
Health care
Military
Police service
Public transportation
Social housing
Telecommunications
Town planning
Waste management
Water services
Public information and archiving, such as libraries
Social services

From that and other sources, I came up with my own list of services that I thought were really ripe for DIY-ification:

Transportation
Police Services
Emergency Care
Public Health
Waste Management

...with the following subsets to each category:

Transportation - subway + bus scheduling, accident alerts, traffic control + routing

Police Services - crime alert, crime prevention, crime awareness

Emergency Care - crisis detection, response, evacuation

Public Health - outbreak detection, public alerts, deterrence

Waste Management - recycling, reduction, location of hazards

...and that was what I presented as a list of low-hanging fruit for DIYcity-type initiatives. Sort of a first stab at an outline for a DIY City 1.0.

Of course, I'm always surprised on the site by the ideas other people have for DIY-type initiatives, and how different they are from my own, so this list is admittedly my own perspective, and not complete.

And now I'm thinking about this again, and I'm interested in putting together a roadmap of services that could be improved with DIY-type methods, to begin to really outline what a DIYcity 1.0 would look like.

So what do you think? Do you like my list? Are there things I'm leaving off?

If so, let me know. As part of the Next Steps for DIYcity, I need to create a finalized version of this "roadmap" to a DIYcity 1.0.

I've spent the last few weeks thinking about the next stage for DIYcity, rather than posting to the site. As I mentioned in an earlier post, everyone, including myself, feels like it is time for DIYcity to make a leap to the next stage. The site has had some good successes, some good proof of concepts, has been instrumental in developing a certain kind of thinking about cities and the web, and now needs to start doing all of that even better. But what that means, and how to get there, has been uncertain. Now I think I have a good idea for this. Certainly, at the least, I have a very interesting idea. Rather than talk about the idea itself though, I'm just going to start steering the site slowing in that direction.

So all new posts you'll see from me are going to be with that idea in mind - the idea of this next stage and how to get there.

Please keep posting whatever you want to the site in the meantime. That element of DIYcity is will not go away regardless of what stage DIYcity is at.