John Geraci

Earlier this week, it was announced that MSNBC had acquired the hyperlocal news and neighborhood Web site EveryBlock. (Read our past coverage of hyperlocal media in New York here.)

John Geraci, creator of the similar hyperlocal Web site outside.in and the man behind the civic Web community DIYcity, weighs in on the news on Urban Omnibus as part of a series on "the design, nature and future of city-wide information gathering and delivery mechanisms."

Six years ago, he recalls, when, as a grad student at N.Y.U., he created a neighborhood bulletin board Web site called Neighbornode, The New York Times speculated that "If these do-it-yourself nodes catch on, a new form of urban communication may emerge.”

Well, location-based news and information Web sites have certainly caught on, and Mr. Geraci believes it's therefore time we reconsider the term "hyperlocal."

Take, for instance, the EveryBlock acquisition:

openplanningproject.org

Streetsblog's Aaron Naparstek.

At the end of day one of the Personal Democracy Forum Conference, as the majority of attendees mingled with beer and wine in hand during a post-conference cocktail hour, a group of about 20 good-government advocates, Web developers and general techie types gathered for a special session called Hacking the City.

According to the conference materials, the purpose of the event—which was something of a local supplement to the more nationally focused panels that had been taking place all day—was to discuss “how online journalism, advocacy and community-building tools are being used to hack the urban political machine, rewrite city government's operating system and transform city dwellers' relationship to their local politics in New York.”

The conversation was led by members of The Open Planning Project, DIYcity founder John Geraci, and Streetsblog editor-in-chief Aaron Naparstek, who began by opening up the floor to thoughts on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement earlier in the day of a new contest for Web developers to design online and mobile applications out of city data, which will soon be made available in a programming-friendly format ("opened up").

The contest, called Big Apps, takes a cue from Washington D.C.’s Apps For Democracy challenge, Mr. Naparstek noted. But, he asked, “What can we do” with city data here in New York City?

Open government has become a hot issue in the city's tech community, as we reported a few weeks ago in an item about a proposal for an Open 311 system. Here's DIYcity's John Geraci on what he's coined "The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System":

Everyone is talking a lot about open government and transparency these days. It's exhilarating stuff, and it's even more exciting to see governments get behind it, creating sites like data.gov in the U.S. for the public to access government information via APIs. But every time I hear someone say something like "our organization is really into transparency" (which is often) it sounds odd to me. It's only talking about a part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle. What we really want (or what I really want anyway) is not simply government transparency, but an open civic system - a civic system that operates, and flourishes, as a fully open system, for whatever level we happen to be talking about - federal, state, city, neighborhood, whatever. And transparency is a big part of that open civic system, but it is still only one part.

The pillars, Mr. Geraci writes in an item on O'Reilly Radar, are Government to Citizen ("creating open pipelines for data directly from government and gov't agencies to whoever is interested in receiving it"); Citizen to Government ("At the city level, C2G is taking shape right now in the form of Open 311 - a open API that anyone can build on that allows residents to create 'problem tickets' for their city to address one way or another"); Citizen to Citizen (Clever Commute, in New Jersey, is one example of a great C2C data flow. Everyone who commutes by train into NYC subscribes to the Clever Commute feed, and then notifies each other of what the current delays are, and where, each morning"); and Government to Government ("think of the efficiencies that could be gained if the NYC DOT were able to exchange realtime data with the NYPD.")

Read the full post here.

On March 8, Council Speaker Christine Quinn proposed creating a mobile application for the city's 311 information line. That way, if someone was trying to find out where the nearest library is or if his car got towed, instead of actually having to speak with an operator—a quaint and perhaps annoying step in the age of the smart phone—his handheld device could just pull up the the same information that 311's call center reps would access from their database.

"You look around New York on the subway, on the ferry, you see almost everybody with some kind of hand-held device, an iPhone, a Blackberry, " Ms. Quinn told the Daily News. "The idea here is to keep growing as technology expands to be more efficient."

But members of the city's tech community want to take that idea a step further. They're proposing an Open 311 system in which the city would free up its 311 data to programmers who could develop savvy custom Web applications out of it.