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Comment by aditya | Hacker News Reader

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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"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.

Yep, Everyblock is doing exactly that, and I commend you all for your work on that. What DIYcity is trying to do is spur more and more projects along these lines to happen - we want to sow the seeds of 1000 Everyblocks. We're doing that by providing a community where people all over the world can exchange ideas on how best to do this, collaborate, and find support for their ideas and their applications.

That may not be worthwhile to you per se, but 500 people in 50 cities around the world think it's useful.

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.

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...

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?

I've never seen this before, but it's definitely a case of being about organization, not tech. It's the difference between "wiki technology" (trivial) and "Wikipedia" (non-trivial).

Agreed 100%. Without an organizing force behind specific implementations of this sort of technology, it's just technology.

Reddit has a Chicago Subreddit. Meanwhile I run a social news site for Chicago. One (my site) is more interesting than the other because we're actually putting people, thought and energy behind it.

I'm more interested in creating better incentives for people to use existing tools to cover their communities.

I think you do this by:

1. Getting them better data - City governments are far from transparent. Newspapers get info out of them at great expense and then sit on it, because it cost them so much. Everyblock, Sunlight and organizations like that are hammering away at this. If you give local bloggers access to better data, they can bring you better coverage and have more fun.

2. Getting them tools to build an audience - Let's say you want to start a blog about businesses in your neighborhood. How do you get that initial bump of traffic to the site? When you have a really good story, how do you share it with your city? If you go to the newspapers, odds are they'll write their own version of your story and not even link to your site. I'm working on WindyCitizen.com to attack this one, a social news site for and by Chicagoans.

3. Get them ways to make $$$ - A lot of folks aren't in it for the money. But if you can make even a few hundred bucks a month off your local blog, that's enough to make it interesting for folks. There are about 10 local advertising startups floating around out there. No one's come up with a really good solution yet. I'm thinking this might be another organization, rather than technology problem.

I agree that sites with people, thought and energy behind them go much farther than sites that are just technology. And DIYcity consciously tries to develop real community in real local areas where it has a presence - through meetups, through locally-oriented message boards, through wikis that are specific to each local area.

In fact, I'd say that's exactly what we're trying to be at DIYcity - an organizing force to what is otherwise just technology. We're trying to take all of the existing technology - the mashup/api/data/etc technology out there and match it up with real people, real interest groups, in real communities.

I also don't think this is just about government data and transparency. That's certainly a piece of the puzzle, but maybe one that is getting too much attention at this very moment. There are lots of types of data you can harness in a city to make it work better. DIYcity is interested in all of them.

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