DIYcity, an open source platform that enables a community of users to develop technology solutions to common problems faced by cities ranging from transportation to healthcare, recently launched its latest application. SickCity provides realtime disease detection capabilities at the local level by mining popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to find key words such as flu, fever or chicken pox that indicate that an individual is ill, under the guise that increasingly people are turning to these networks to tell their friends how they’re feeling. The results are then plotted on chart showing 30-day trends for a particular [...]

We’re looking forward to having John Geraci, the brains behind DIYcity and co-founder of Outside.in, join us this Thursday at PSFK Conference NYC 2009. John will be participating in our “Open to Change” panel along with Domenico Vitale (People Ideas & Culture), Scott Heiferman (Meetup), Florian Peter (CScout) and Avner Ronen (boxee), where he will discuss the potential of leveraging open communities to develop new products, services and experiences for the benefit of everybody concerned.
First, who are you and what do you do?
John Geraci, creator of DIYcity and co-founder of Outside.in.
I find ways to make cities and neighborhoods work better [...]

We wrote about DIYcity back in late October shortly after its launch. During its roughly six month life span, the budding online project has successfully created a forum for a global community of users to discuss ways that technologies can be utilized to make their respective cities run more efficiently and move towards a more sustainable model. Over that time, creator John Geraci has noticed one overarching challenge begin to emerge, an issue he identifies in a recent post by asking the question, “Can we, collectively, come up with a complete set of tools that ordinary people everywhere can plug into [...]