OpenBlock is OpenPlans’ hyper-local news and data platform.  How local? Hyper local, crazy local! Loco local!  Your zip code, your neighborhood, your block…

Just hitting version 1.0, OpenBlock dries out the crime blotter, stops new pushpins on the wall map, and takes away your village gossip’s exclusive on new stories.  OpenBlock allows news and events to be reported in map form at the exact place where it happened.  Find things by sorting by zip code, address or neighborhood.  It aggregates information from those community blogs, pull data from your nearby open gov data feeds and grabs information from all over the place.

• OpenBlock can power a standalone website where users can browse by location (right down to the single-block level!), by date, or by kind of news.
• Or as a service you can integrate with other websites in various ways – via a REST API, via custom RSS feeds, and via custom widgets you can embed in your existing pages.

Deployed either way, OpenBlock is an open source platform to make civic data and local news accessible. It allows the city to be cut and sorted, sliced and diced into near-infinite levels and time frames. Try out the demo, or read the list of features. Developers should head over to join our open source community and see all the action on GitHub.

So how might you use it? Well, just imagine…

Imagine your kid almost gets hit by a car… Is your neighborhood host to a lot of car accidents?  Are many ticket citations issued? Are there many drunk driving arrests?  If the data is out there, you can see it on a OpenBlock-powered website.

Wonder if all that hype about your changing neighborhood is true… How many renovation permits were issued in the last three years? How many new restaurants opened?  How many old buildings were demolished?

Want to run a website rounding up all your local blogs… Add local blogs and news feeds, then explore them by neighborhood or date. Your follows can sign up to get roundup email updates for particular neighborhoods, or get a consolidated RSS feed for their existing news reader.

Want to see which neighborhood is more lively…. See how many block parties happened  in a 3 block area between May and August.  What to do this weekend – events, block parties, shows, gallery openings will all display.

If you’d like to hear more, tune in to our screencast next week.

Our work on OpenBlock has been supported by the Knight Foundation. Many thanks to them, and to our partners at the Boston Globe and Columbia Tribune, and the OpenBlock community. Read more about the history of OpenBlock.