What is CityMatter?
Citymatter is a media platform that delivers tightly curated entertaining and useful content to help people navigate their cities. We focus on presenting interactive data visualizations about life in cities, including performance indicators in key areas like safety, transportation, city life, and real estate. Citymatter enables you to drill down, learn more, read local media story, get things done through the app, share, embed, and generally engage with the place you call home.
What is the Beta stage?
Citymatter is designed for local readerships – not government or as a marketing platform. This beta is our testing ground. We’re collecting and sorting sources and developing the set of indicators to report. We’re laser focused on user experience, and are conducting interviews, user testing, polling – it’s where we release new experiments and
blog about the process. We invite you to participate!
What kind of data is relevant?
For this beta stage we are looking for something very simple: getting data that’s as granular as possible for
eight test categories, and then nailing down that whole processing and presenting data business to entertain and delight. That’s it.
Sounds awesome!
How can I help?
Thank you! Please subscribe to our mailing list (we swear we won’t spam!), read and comment on our blog, follow us on Twitter (@citymatter), or become part of our forum and help us create a network of amazing people sharing resources to make our cities better!
I know about a dataset that you would love! What should I do?
Please send the file or url where we can download it to lope@citymatter.co . We’ll be happy to include credits for you and Twitter info. We don’t have access to many city-specific resources, so we truly appreciate all possible help.
I know somebody you should meet / talk to / follow on Twitter
Awesome! We are VERY interested in meeting open data / open gov folks and public servants from all over the US, and hopefully become a helpful forum for debate, resource-gathering and best practices. Please check our contact info
here.
Are you going to build an API?
We want to make the results of CityMatter, both in its Beta and launch phase as open and user friendly as possible. Whether it’s building an API to make easily-embeddable interactive graphs, or even local apps; we are considering multiple options!
What happens after the Beta?
Each of the cities in this stage has a progress report, once the Beta is completed we’ll produce an insights report and decide where to take it from there. Most likely, we’ll build and launch a platform to deliver information to people living in cities, which will be designed around the user experience. Optimistically, we’ll conclude that creating a useful tool for citizens and local governments is feasible.
Who is behind CityMatter?
The project team includes Lope Gutierrez-Ruiz, Michelle Benaim Steiner, Mariana Santos, our kickass designers, and a ragtag team of partners,
collaborators ,
allies and advisors. And of course anybody who would like to help make our cities better! This project is currently being developed during a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. More information about Knight Fellowships
here.