June 17th I was at MIT to attend the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference. Civic hackers galore. More specifically I was there because of the “Data into Action” panel. Nick Grossman, my boss, was on the panel — among other things, announcing OpenBlock.

What’s OpenBlock? In a nutshell, we’ll be leading the effort to make the technology behind everyblock.com more accessible to newspapers that don’t have a huge web budget. So a local paper could put up maps of “hyperlocal news” – stuff you care about happening in your neighborhood, down to the block level. Read on..

But good news all around:

• OpenGeo will be helping OBIS, the world’s largest marine biogeographic database, move to an open source mapping platform.
• Tomorrow at Personal Democracy Forum, Phil will be talking about OpenMuni and the intersection of open data, open source, and municipal governments.
• Kim and Rebecca are at Vélo Québec, leading a workshop on bringing livable streets issues into classrooms.