Recently, TOPP Labs embarked on a joint venture with Transportation Alternatives to build a “Candidate Survey” website, showing New York users how their local political candidates responded to a TA survey. TA is going to build the public-facing site, and TOPP is going to build a back-end service that does geographic lookup of candidates based Read more…

Thanks to everyone who came to the Hacking the City event last night at Personal Democracy Forum. The NYFI blog at the NY Observer has a nice write-up: 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 Read more…

The Economist, in its June 6th 2009 issue article “Mapping a better world,” discusses the role maps play in effecting social change.  They seem to miss, however, how open source tools directly influence this development.  Open source mapping is not about budgeting for the non-profit with limited resources.   Rather, it provides solutions that work for Read more…

The developers at OpenGeo have been working with others toward an initial release of the GeoExt toolkit.  GeoExt brings together the spatial capabilities of OpenLayers with the user interface power of ExtJS.  To demonstrate the types of applications that can be built with GeoExt, we’re putting out a preview release of GeoExplorer. The goal of Read more…

Who knew there are over 3000 block parties in New York City each summer?  Well, we’ve just launched BlockPartyNYC.org to be the go-to site for everything block party.  The site both contains information to assist you in throwing a block party, and allows you to promote your block party on our interactive map.  You can Read more…

We just put up a new case study about how Western Australia’s is leveraging open source software and collaborative mapping. As the government authority responsible for land and property information, Landgate manages data that underpins hundreds of civil services. Landgate had TOPP’s OpenGeo division build a prototype for collaborative mapping, and the result has the Read more…

My first session was facilitated by Karen Adams, who works in Senate Tech Services. Karen came with a kernel of an idea for a ‘NY Senatepedia wiki’…a place where people could explain Senate jargon, document the histories of different legal actions, and connect items with related information.

A Senatepedia has a ton of merit. It would facilitate peer-to-peer learning between private citizens. It would put in plain view the machinery of [...]