

DIYCity: An operating system for a user driven city - aditya
http://diycity.org/diycity-main-group/big-challenge-diycity-operating-system-user-driven-city

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tdoggette
This is happening anyway: The internet provides maps, contact information for
businesses, user opinions on everything, and, increasingly, nifty location-
awareness tech. What value does this project add to all of the tools that the
market has provided?

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aditya
True, the tech is mostly out there but no one is bringing it together to
really reshape communities and help spread information.

One of the DIYCity challenges produced SickCity (<http://sickcity.org/> like
Google Flu Trends on Twitter), which is incredibly cool since you can now sort
of see in semi-realtime the impact and spread of common diseases.

I'm not the person behind DIYCity (only peripherally involved) but I think
it's kinda cool because there's going to be a lot of public data out there
soon that can be used to improve quality of life in most big cities and the
government is too slow to innovate so that's where projects like these would
come in.

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adrianh
"the tech is mostly out there but no one is bringing it together to really
reshape communities and help spread information"

I beg to differ! :-) That's exactly what we're doing at EveryBlock.com. We do
the work of bringing together news and a whole lot of public data for public
benefit.

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aditya
you're right - but where is the EveryBlock API so we can use all that awesome
data to actually create interesting mashups that will make life easier? :)

In general, I agree with john, the more open-ness and access, the better it
will be for everyone involved.

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adrianh
Hey aditya,

I was responding specifically to your confident assertion that "no one is
bringing it together," which is a bit of a stretch, in fairness to the many
projects that already exist. Lots of people are doing this sort of thing, both
at the local level and national level: EveryBlock, the Sunlight Foundation,
MySociety in the UK, independent one-off projects...

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aditya
yeah -- didn't mean to underplay what all these people have been doing, it
isn't an easy problem to solve (possibly why you're all working on it, right?
:)

The point I was trying to make was, the data is out there (especially with
Twitter) - if you're an interested hacker and you understand your unique local
problems, why not figure out a way to build the tools that will help your
community based on all the public data sources available, as opposed to
waiting for EveryBlock (or anybody else) to expand their coverage.

I'm sure you've thought about the problem more than I have but de-
centralization and encouraging communities to build their own tools seems like
a much better longer term model, no?

