Alan Bell has used machine learning to develop a program that analyses data from traffic cameras to identify blocked bus and bike lanes. He analysed a section of St. Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan and found that the bike lane was blocked 55% of the time and the bus stop was blocked 57% of the time […]
The Transit Alliance Miami has created a simple graphic display illustrating the time between Miami Metrorail trains (frequency) at the Government Center station. They have taken Metrorail data and displayed it in an easy to understand format. It is an excellent example of how city residents can use open data to analyse and publicise the […]
The Making Sense project is funded by the European Commission and has the mission to make advances and experiments in participatory sensing. According to making-sense.eu Making Sense aims to explore how open source software, open source hardware, digital maker practices and open design can be effectively used by local communities to fabricate their own sensing tools, […]
Getting Smart on Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Transport Authorities from Emerging Data Sources was produced by the Urban Transport Group and presents results of an emerging data catapult meeting held in May 2016. The report presents very helpful and interesting information.
Our Analyse page describes ways to crowdsource data analysis and collection. Here’s an interesting post from the Open Knowledge International Blog about a new report on the subject: The report “Making Citizen-Generated Data Work” asks what makes citizens and others want to produce and use citizen-generated data. It was written by Danny Lämmerhirt, Shazade Jameson, and […]
Tom Saunders of NESTA has written an excellent post: Power to the people: how cities can use digital technology to engage and empower citizens. It recommends four strategies: Resist the temptation to build an app; Think about what you want to engage citizens for; Remember there’s a world beyond the internet; and, Pick the right question for […]
Transitland is a cool new project from the open-source map developers and transit experts at Mapzen. It describes itself as: “A community-edited data service aggregating transit networks across metropolitan and rural areas around the world” in other words a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in public transport data. It’s a repository of data feeds from public […]
A really important question about citizen collected data is how to it can be distributed and used by others. Of course people can just put their data on the Internet with an API feed, but that’s probably not the best way of making it usable. A group called Civicus.org has just released a report called […]
Citizen Sense is an European Research Council project investigating the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement. The project runs from 2013 – 2017 and is being led by Dr Jennifer Gabrys. According to the project’s home page: Practices of monitoring and sensing environments have migrated to a number of everyday participatory […]
Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard is a fascinating article taking you from the word dashboard’s origin through examples of what we think of today as urban dashboards. But it’s more than a history, author Shannon Mattern integrates critical thought about data, how it’s analysed and used, as well as ideas for the […]