On March 10, DIYcity launched SickCity, an application that monitors social networking platforms including Twitter for terms like “feeling ill,” “flu,” “head cold” and “food poisoning” within a particular city so users might actually be able to detect when and where a health bug is infecting their neighborhood. Google has a similar application for flu trends, but the data is based on people’s searches on Google.com along with somewhat out-of-date historic data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. SickCity has real-time updates from a much smaller set of users, but it allows them to search for sickness by city, which is not offered by Google. Mr. Geraci and his team are discussing semantics, consulting with statisticians and are in talks with people who have worked for health departments in major cities to improve the application.
Daniel Greenblatt, a Long Island native who now works as an interaction designer for Motorola in Chicago, helped write the code for both DIYtraffic and SickCity. Calling in from Chicago, he explained that all those seemingly frivolous tweets and Facebook status updates whining about a cold or hearing a gunshot or waiting for the F train for an extra 20 minutes can actually be gathered up and spun into a useful application that can improve quality of life—especially when they are combined with government data stats.
“In the future, we’ll look back on it as a kind of watershed; this is when we started flooding the world with all of this information and data and user-generated content,” Mr. Greenblatt said.
He added that DIYcity’s projects are designed to allow anyone with a cellphone to participate with SMS text messaging, not just those gadget-wielding iPhone and BlackBerry users. People have the chance to participate in improving their city—just by tweeting or texting their own, personal news. It’s the do-it-yourself—and sharable—311.
About 60 cities have created their own DIYcity sites and more than 500 people have signed up to participate, according to Mr. Geraci, who describes himself as the “MC” of the conversation. “I host the conversation and try to keep the conversation going,” Mr. Geraci said. “It seems like that is the meme of the moment for 2009. What else do we have? Everybody is losing their jobs and nobody can actually pay for these things, so let’s make things work by a better means.”
DIYcity IS THE culmination of six years of Mr. Geraci’s work to improve cities with the Web. A Bay Area native, Mr. Geraci graduated from N.Y.U.’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, an incubator for some of the city’s brightest tech brains, in 2005. In May 2004, he launched Neighbornode, a project that took the local community corkboard online—encouraging neighbors to set up their own wireless hot spots and create connections through electronic bulletin boards. The next year he created Grafedia, which connected graffiti in the streets to the online world. His thesis project, Foundcity, took inspiration from bookmarking site del.icio.us and photo-sharing site Flickr, and asked users to “bookmark” real-world locations and sites by text or picture message and “tag” them with descriptive words.
In February 2007, Mr. Geraci co-founded (with Everything Bad Is Good for You author Steven Johnson) Outside.in, a site that scrapes information from local blogs, event listings and other online media so people can see what’s happening locally. Mr. Geraci recently reduced his responsibilities as head product developer for Outside.in and is only working part time to devote himself to fund-raising and advocacy efforts for DIYcity.
Back at the Cobble Hill park, Mr. Geraci said that the current recession provides the “perfect storm” to show technology’s potential to city industries and governments—and he hopes they tag along. “I feel like there’s a possibility, you know, maybe the recession will end, businesses will pick up, and everyone will go back to their old jobs, too,” he told The Observer. “But there’s a possibility that we might find new systems, new marketplaces for people to do work and get paid for innovation to happen.” He hopes city politicians, financiers and Facebookers, too, will help him build his dream city of the future—but bring it to real life right now.
greagan@observer.com
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