Civic Commons, a non-profit initiative that aims to help cities and local governments harness the power of shared technologies and adapt to a more collaborative software development methodology, recently released an app store for civic technology called the Civic Commons Marketplace. Just last week, an alpha version of the Civic Commons Marketplace API for this app store was also released.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the O’Reilly Strata Conference in New York City, and sat in on a very important keynote from Drew Conway and Jake Porway about their project, Data Without Borders.
Data Without Borders is looking to match non-profits in need of data analysis with freelance and pro bono data scientists who can work to help them with data collection, analysis, visualization, or provide decision support.
Internet Archive have released a REST API that gives developers access to their historical snapshots of the web. It is based on the Amazon S3 API, and is currently the best way to access the Internet Archive data.
The digital media world is in the process of dramatic change. For years, the Internet has been about web sites and browser-based experiences, and the systems that drove those sites generally matched those experiences. But now, the portable world is upon us and it is formidable. With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems. It requires distribution platforms, API’s and other ways to get the content to where it needs to be. But having an API is not enough. In order for content providers to take full advantage of these new platforms, they will need to, first and foremost, embrace one simple philosophy: COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere).
National Public Radio (NPR) has just opened another means for developers to access content from NPR.org: a new API for transcripts. This API provides access to tens of thousands of transcripts from some of the most popular programs on NPR. As we covered last year and in our NPR API Profile, their APIs open-up a range of interesting possibilities.
Developer’s interested in giving back to the community should check out All for Good’s new API (our All for Good API Profile). If you are not familiar with All for Good, it is a new service that lets you browse volunteer activities and find events based on your location or interests.
Developers have seen the value of mapping APIs. Look no further than our list of map mashups for proof that there’s a lot of value in maps to visualize location data. But how useful are web maps to a humanitarian organization? When you’re working in more than 30 countries, as MercyCorps is, perhaps the answer is obvious.
Among the collections in the Brooklyn Museum are found eleven bronze sculptures by Rodin, five seminal Judy Chicago works, two Edward Hopper iconic paintings, and now one open-to-the-public API, with no admission fee. The API allows for programmatic search of the digitized collections of the museum, which encompasses more than 10,000 individual works. More details at our new Brooklyn Museum API Profile.
Social Actions takes actions posted on the web from more than forty different socially progressive organizations, and aggregates them into a common format for easy discovery. The actions are concrete activities like volunteering, donating, signing a petition, making a loan, or attending a meetup, all in the service of “making a difference” for issues like Darfur, cancer, LGBT, prison reform, and other activist concerns. On the Social Actions site interested citizens can search the opportunities, and an API (our Social Actions API profile) allows developers to build on top of the stream of postings.
A few weeks ago we reported on the release of the Kiva API, which provides access to the Kiva.org global microlending database. Not long after the API’s release, blog posts from Bill Zimmerman and the Kiva team report that several developers are already working on Kiva mashups:
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