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.
Avada Admin

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!
Avada Admin

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.
Avada Admin

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!
Avada Admin

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.
Avada Admin

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.
Avada Admin

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!
Avada Admin

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.
Avada Admin

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.