DIYCity.org is an extremely interesting website, and an even more encouraging resource and tool. John Geraci, the founder, is a man whom I really admire. I mean the guy is passionate about making life in cities better by leveraging and using web technologies…! How cool is that?
DIYCity is a site that connect web developers with urban planners all over the world. Together, they create open source tools for the city’s residents so that they may have a better lifestyle.
Sounds similar to what Church Planters are trying to do these days, or rather, what their intentions are.
I think we can learn a thing or two from John and what he’s doing over there, especially because they are actually doing something and is more than just a hodgepodge of intellectuals clammering for brainspace.
Take a look at their About page (I’ve highlighted crucial ideas to “borrow”):
DIYcity is a site where people from all over the world think about, talk about, and ultimately build tools for making their cities work better with web technologies.
The site launched in October 2008 and has since spawned local groups in more than 50 cities around the world. Web developers, urban planners, sustainability designers, students, government workers and more contribute to the discussions to help discover new ways of applying free and open technology to problems facing our urban areas today. In doing so, their aim is to reinvent their cities as places that are more efficient, more cost-effective, more sustainable, and simply more livable places to be.
This collective desire to improve city living is channeled into three areas on DIYcity: 1) discussions, where people exchange thoughts and come up with ideas for products, 2) design, where people boil these discussions down into actual products, and 3) development, where teams of programmers build and launch DIYcity products.
The result is an open source suite of tools that residents of any city, anywhere, can plug into and use to make their area better. This toolset, as it grows, becomes an initial version of a city/resident interface. This interface is the ultimate product, and the ultimate goal, of DIYcity.
I think we need a bit more of this mentality in our technoevangelical circuit, right?
If this really jazzes you up, go read more from O’Reilly’s blog here about “The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory“.
[Image from NRBelex] – I really like how the time-lapsed photography looks like ethernet cable wiring…