The Hyperlocal Web – EveryBlock.com

As a former architecture student turned software developer, I’m always looking for interesting web sites that bring together different fields of study and disparate sources of information, and I thought everyblock.com deserved a mention here at neoHOUSTON. EveryBlock is one of many recent web sites that fall under the umbrella of the Hyperlocal Web:

EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city.

Simply put, EveryBlock is basically aggregating public sources of data including local news feeds, Flickr photos, Yelp reviews, and most importantly local government databases into an easy to use web interface. CNN.com recently published a story on EveryBlock as they have reached a total of eleven cities to date, and it’s an interesting read:

Some interesting “hyperlocal” Web sites have emerged in the past few years, the idea behind them being to provide news at an extremely local level. Prominent among them is EveryBlock.com, launched last year in Chicago.

The site now covers about a dozen major cities in the U.S. It aggregates, largely through computer programming, information feeds from commercial, nonprofit, or government sources, down to the level of a city block, and up to the level of the entire city.

To acquire government data, EveryBlock has staff committed to working out data-feed arrangements with municipal governments in the U.S. Some of it is freely available, but in other cases relationships need to be painstakingly forged. Often it’s a struggle.

I ran across an interesting post on the EveryBlock blog the other day about one of the founders testifying before a Chicago City Council committee in favor of an open records ordinance, this one specifically related to how and why money is spent in Tax Increment Financing districts in Chicago. That post will lead you to all kinds of great links related to opening up government data to be more accessible to the general public, something I would love to see more of in Houston. It’s surprising how often information that is supposed to be public is essentially hidden from civic scrutiny because of the cost to publish or release information.

As an example, consider water usage statistics. I saw an article published last August in the Austin American Statesman (quoted in the NYTimes here) showed the top 10 residential and commercial water users in the City of Austin, and after reading it I was determined to figure out a similar statistic for the City of Houston. After waiting almost two months to hear back from a representative from the City of Houston PWE about how to actually get the data, they sent me this spreadsheet detailing the cost to pull this data from the City’s database. Needless to say, I am somewhat of a cheapskate and I didn’t want to shell out $144 (!!!) to find out the top 10 residential water users in the City, and the Chronicle’s database team showed no interest in buying it either.

The point is, it really shouldn’t be that hard to get this so-called public information into the hands of the public. I’m really excited to see EveryBlock working with cities all around the country to make it easier, faster, and hopefully cheaper. That’s the driving force of the hyperlocal movement: there’s very useful and/or interesting information all over the place, and lots of people who might like to see it. Pooling collective resources makes greater information access possible.

If anyone is interested in seeing Houston get added to the list, please go to the EveryBlock home page, and click the “Don’t see your city?” link below the current list of cities and send in your vote! I left them a note letting them know that I would be willing to help in the effort, so please do the same if you’re interested. I imagine it’s going to be a lot of work getting the City of Houston to come to grips with the open records and hyperlocal revolution, but it needs to happen, and it’s going to take some grassroots evangelism to help  spread the word.

Let me know what you think about the hyperlocal movement by leaving a comment, and for more information check out these sites:

• http://www.hyperlocal101.com/
• How Print Publications Can Help HyperLocal Sites
  
• Rethinking the Local Paper