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Farm to Market

By Philip Ashlock | Published: May 31, 2009
Aquifers Feed Community Development Beyond the Garden Healthy civic engagement is often based around an emergent collective influence, a momentum from the coalescence of many individuals’ activity. As developers of civic software this is a concept we think of often and try to embrace, especially within the context of a dense urban environment. Such environments Read more...
Posted in Activity Feeds, Community Involvement, open government | 2 Comments

Does usefully open data have to mean XML?

By ian bicking | Published: May 29, 2009
I’ve been having some discussions with people at the Chicago Open Government group, talking about data openness. One common complaint all around is about data exported as PDFs. The particular topic we were discussing was TIFs. TIFs (Tax Increment Financing) are something a city can use to try to improve a neighborhood, Read more...
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

NYC powers up CityMap2.0 using GeoServer

By Vanessa Hamer | Published: May 28, 2009
New York City recently launched CityMap2.0, an application "bursting with souped-up mapping features." The map offers plenty of helpful city data, from Federal Stimulus projects to service centers of all types. An article in Government Technology explains: "It’s one of our most heavily used applications. We got a lot of requests for enhancements," said Colin Reilly, director Read more...
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MTA NYCT Bus in GTFS

By novalis | Published: May 22, 2009
Here at TOPP I’ve been working on ways to better present and manipulate New York City bus scheduling data. Google Transit has the MTA’s bus timing data so that they can do trip planning. But the MTA for some reason won’t let them release it. I filed a FOIL request with the MTA for Read more...
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Getting creative with our streets

By Vanessa Hamer | Published: May 21, 2009
Livable Streets Education's recent street-painting event is drawing praise in Brooklyn. Reports the Brooklyn Downtown Star:"Paint the Pavement" was a collaborative initiative designed to liven up and designate the school zone outside P.S. 67, across the street from Whitman-Ingersoll, as well as teach students about the community-building power of public art. Dozens of volunteers and hundreds of kids came Read more...
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Where is where…

By Paul Ramsey, writing for OpenGeo Blog | Published: May 18, 2009
… OpenGeo will be next week!  On workshop day, Paul Ramsey will be presenting on Spatial Database Tips and Tricks, and Justin Deoliveira will be presenting on the OpenGeo suite of software. Read more...
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Livable Streets at Celebrate Brooklyn

By Vanessa Hamer | Published: May 14, 2009
Celebrate Brooklyn this year will be particularly bike friendly, and Livable Streets Education will be on hand on Family Day (July 11th) to lead family-friendly activities that investigate the reasons why pedestrians, cyclists, and mass transit riders protect the environment.Livable Streets is proud to be a key sponsor of this season, and they have a Read more...
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2 Million Served!

By Clarence Eckerson, writing for Streetfilms | Published: May 14, 2009
We are proud to report that the official number of plays of all Streetfilms has now reached 2 million!  That's it, end of news item. Read more...
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DataIO

By anil | Published: May 13, 2009
A few months ago, while a solution for the MTA budget shortfall was being debated by the New York State Senate,  The Open Planning Project helped parse MTA budget data into a machine searchable format. The MTA originally published the budget as a PDF. To extract the data I used a utility called pdftohtml to Read more...
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