We pushed a new build last night to our production servers that addresses what many users have been asking for. You can explore the data without logging in. If you want to save the charts you’ve created you’ll need to login. We use rpx, which makes it easy to choose an existing system you already have an account for, or create a new openID just for the site.
You can find out more about the project and my role on this project here.
The day job. I am currently lead User Experience expert, interaction designer, visual designer, and lead developer of CityForward.
I am a Media Director and User Experience Developer at IBM. My experience includes interaction design, visual design, 3-D design, and code development for clients including Coca Cola, L.L.Bean, The Smithsonian, MoMA NYC, The Palace Museum Beijing, The Hermitage Museum, The Egyptian Museum Cairo, and City Forward. I have shared my code expertise in publication with WIley WROX, have been interviewed by the New York Times Magazine for my work in virtual world environment development, and I have worked with students at Ball State University as a Design Research Fellow.
CityForward sums it up in an elevator summary as “City Forward is a free, web-based platform that enables users – city officials, researchers, academics and interested citizens world-wide – to view and interact with city data while engaging in an ongoing public dialogue.” But of course it’s more than that, it’s about accessibility of the data, and importantly findability of and within the data. Public data is dispersed among groups, systems, standards, formats and sometimes in well intentioned but difficult public catalogs inconstantly provided by cash strapped governments and institutions. City Forward seeks to solve this problem and proposes a solution that allows citizens to find and react to data and make all of our lives better by improving our cities through knowledge and communication.
When people ask me what I do for work, I get to tell them without a doubt I work to make the world a better place. When I have disappeared for awhile, and I am not posting updates to my tumblr, it is because I am trying to save the world with a little bit of code at a time.
The site is not without it’s ongoing challenges as we solve this enormously difficult problem. Try it out though, and share with us how you like to see and use data in our new data-rich world. We have a lot of changes planned this year to improve how we allow users (We’re gonna remove that login step!) to explore the data and share their ideas. I am excited to see how it evolves.
And now it’s Friday, so I am gonna throw the camera on my shoulder and go for a walk in the woods….and maybe think about some code.
