Hi, I'm Nick.
I love cities and the Internet.
I grew up in NYC and now live in Boston with my amazing wife and two great kids.
I'm Advocate-in-Residence at Union Square Ventures and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, in the Center for Civic Media.
Previously, I led an incubator for technology & media businesses at OpenPlans, where we created things like: Open311, MTA Bus Time, Civic Works, OpenPlans Transportation, NY Transit Data, OpenTripPlanner, Civic Commons, UncivilServants, TransportationCamp, Streetsblog, Streetfilms and GothamSchools.
On a personal level, I'm more helpful than thoughtful
(but working on it).
@nickgrossman on Twitter- Tumblr
- My LinkedIn profile
- GitHub
- Contact
-
Tweets
- @AlanSherton not yet - I just signed up today. will let you know
- Photo: One of my favorite photos - taken in 2010 at the Chicago Innovation Center Step 2: Receive bacon (by... http://t.co/mdYD98UiVM
- Wow, @flickr is starting to get nice again. Pretty cool. http://t.co/wseTVPyw7r
- Trying to get Frannie to like @daftpunk. Feel like describing them as "a funk band made up of robots" vs as a techno band, may help
- Just signed up for @CitibikeNYC. I'm member # 16446. can't wait. sign up here: http://t.co/ScaUz7OmczMay 25, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @BrooklynSpoke: Residents of Barrow Street successfully moved bike share station now free to take in this historic view. #citibike http:…May 25, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @BrooklynSpoke: Citi Bike: for anyone who's ever wondered what it would've been like had Instagram existed when the subway opened. http…May 25, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @abestanway totally!
- So psyched to see bike share come to NYC. Going to transform the city (in a good way)
- Reminder of the day from @albertwenger: Net Native Means Previously Impossible http://t.co/K7zYWkASIN
- I just backed A Statue of Nikola Tesla in the Silicon Valley on @Kickstarter http://t.co/OZo2YXkc5v
- RT @EnoughPie: 10 ways civic hacking is good for cities: helps citizens serve themselves, make space for innovation http://t.co/yQcMre5sww …
- .@senwarren I'm from MA & #iMarch b/c our economy, families & jobs need #immigration reform. http://t.co/tJzelh8lAS
- .@SenMoCowan I'm from #MA & #iMarch b/c our economy, families & jobs need #immigration reform. http://t.co/tJzelh8lAS
- What a great headline: "Airbnb Illegal in NYC Except When the City Needs It" http://t.co/Jz3LmpcUO2 #airbnb #nyc
- "The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers." https://t.co/o9egfYdOGx
- RT @marissamayer: First ever acquisition announced by animated gif :) @Yahoo is acquiring @Tumblr. http://t.co/QzvhAzLLx5 #keepcalmandcarr…
-
Posts
One of my favorite photos - taken in 2010 at the Chicago Innovation Center
Step 2: Receive bacon (by wrkng)
It is not about building a smoother version of what already exists in the market. That is a transient advantage as existing companies adopt technology. If you want to build something big and lasting you have use the internet/mobile to do something that simply was not possible before.
These are not illegal hotels. These are amazing stories within a core community of hosts and travelers adding to the diverse fabric of New York.
As so many of those same legislators have made clear since then, the target of the laws was never intended to be these individual residents. These are not illegal hotel operators trying to make a quick buck. These are people like Maria, who has used her income to work less and spend more time with her husband. Or Emmett, who still keeps in touch with the friends he’s met from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Or Evelyn, who saved her home from foreclosure with the money she makes from Airbnb.
Nice video from IOBY on how to make a play street in your community.
How to Make a Play Street (by ioby)
If other people can’t use pull-to-refresh, they can never build on top of it either.
Dear Photograph,
For most of my childhood, my maternal grandparents lived only a few minutes away, and my sister and I spent countless days and nights with them. Family gatherings generally took place at their house - a constant throughout my childhood, and the place I felt the most safe. My grandfather passed away almost four years ago, after a long battle against a variety of diseases. He was on hospice care in his home, and it was a horrible last few months. After, I found it difficult to go back to the house that meant so much to me, even to visit my grandmother. The rooms that once filled with laughter seemed oddly still, and filled with unhappy memories. Watching my grandmother without her husband of 53 years was hard as well. In four years it hasn’t gotten any easier. But then, on Mother’s Day, as we gathered with my aunts and uncles and cousins in my grandparents’ home, I decided to use the box of photos on the living room table for a Dear Photograph project. This experience of creating a new picture by placing my grandfather back in the kitchen he loved, was the most therapeutic way of dealing with his death I’ve found so far.
EdenDear photograph is so beautiful
in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly,
and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blonde, Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility (PDF)- Riding on Services
I’ve been working on an internal web app for the past few weeks.
I’m not a “real” programmer, so as usual I just figure things out as I go along and make lots of mistakes, but I always learn new stuff. This is how I learned programming in the first place, got my first gigs building websites, then ended up at OpenPlans, Code for America and now USV. My favorite thing about the web is how it makes it possible to just pick a direction and learn as you go. It’s amazing, really.
My background is that I’m good with front-end development (html/css/js) and decent with PHP (have built a ton of wordpress websites, plugins, themes), but I quickly trail off from there. So I’m very comfortable in some places, and not so much in others (linux admin, deploying python apps, etc).
But for this project, I decided to try something new. I’m using tornado (a python web framework), paired with mongodb. The app is hosted at Heroku and my mongo database is running in the cloud at Mongolab. I’m using twitter auth for log-ins, and I’m also using the hackpad API to embed editable documents in the app.
What’s so cool about this is that pretty much everything is a cloud-hosted service, wired together in a really light way to make the app. There is a tiny amount of application-specific code. If we had used Brubeck instead of Tornado, there’d be even less.
It’s been a joy to develop in this environment. I like programming in python, and mongodb is a breath of fresh air. And being able to simply wire in things like hackpad (with some really great help from Igor) has been amazing. Deploying updates is as simple as git
push heroku masterand heroku does all the heavy lifting.Much of the starter code for this came from Zach, our hacker-in-residence at USV, who’s been working on an update for USV.com. I don’t think I’d have been able to do it without his starting point — but looking at the Brubeck docs, which are quite good (kudos, James), perhaps that’s not true.
All of this reminds me of a post my friend Ian Bicking wrote a few years ago about What PHP Deployment Gets Right. For those who don’t know Ian, he is a rockstar python developer who understands the low level stuff better than anyone I’ve been around — among other things he wrote pip and virtualenv, which are primary tools for anyone developing in python. Anyway, the point of Ian’s post is that PHP deployment is, and always has been, so easy that it’s possible for people (like me, until recently) who are afraid of going deeper than the file system, to program and deploy apps.
Ian’s post is 5 years old now, and a lot has changed. It’s pretty sweet how the hurdles for developing web apps keep getting lower and lower.
It’s really hard to say. The whole starting point of that record was to somehow question the magical powers of recorded audio at a time when pop music is mostly recorded on laptops with a small microphone and a pair of headphones in airport lounges and hotel rooms. We’re not really part of that generation. We’re part of the previous generation, where a studio was a collection of hardware and electronic components assembled in a discreet way to try to create a unique global system in a home environment; somehow a distinctive system.
The idea was really having this desire for live drums, as well as questioning, really, why and what is the magic in samples? Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain? Because harmonically the samples are just an F minor or a G flat, something not so special. It occurred to us it’s probably a collection of so many different parameters; of amazing performances, the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then. It was not an easy task, but took a certain craftsmanship somehow cultivated at the time.
We started to say, “OK, let’s see from a production standpoint, also in terms of performance, whether we could create records that embed this level of production and craftsmanship, and see whether the culture would allow for records like this to be produced. ”So it’s true that we decided to try to recreate these circumstances and really select a team of firsthand actors in witness of that golden age, that era and in the same time go back to the places where that magic had happened. We really think, we feel the walls can speak, and at the same time there’s really this idea that these are magical places.
This reminds me of how Portishead pressed their own vinyl just to be able to scratch it and sample it.
It also sheds light on the name, Random Access Memories. They’ve made an album explicitly to be referenced (sampled) in the future.
But it’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.
Chris Anderson, Wired 14.07: People Power
an oldie (2006) but a goodie, and as relevant today as ever.
The Wantrepreenur, the Glory getter Wannabe-Steve-Jobs’. They want the admiration, the envy, the success. They’re just not willing to do anything to jeopardize that dream. Mounting an all out effort for revenue and failing would kill that dream. So don’t ask those users who say they will pay to pay. Don’t knock on doors. Keep playing in the pitch contests and keep talking to the press.
The Entrepreneur are more like Job from the story of Job in the Bible. They’re in it for their faith in the product, for thier belief in their vision. They’re willing to endure without the need for instant gratification. They know that they’re faith will be affirmed when they generat profitable revenue. When they can prove they’ve built a real living thing…. a business…. a revenue generator.
They’re not play acting. They’re the real thing. They’re willing to suffer without glory in the faith that they’re hard work will persevere.
— Driven Forward, via @fakegrimlock
- There is a lot of awesome music on soundcloud. But it’s particularly cool to see the comments popping up at different moments during the tracks. https://soundcloud.com/jolly-mare | http://www.facebook.com/jollymareofficial Download all the stems here! Submit your entry to our “Remix Competition” Group Dropbox before the deadline. The lucky winner (chosen by Jolly Mare & Bad Panda) will see his remix digitally released + one free SoundCloud premium account. More info at : http://badpandarecords.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/jolly-mare-tutto-bene-remix-contest/ Contest ends April 21st, 2013. Tempo: 104 bpm. Look forward to hearing your remix! —- http://eepurl.com/rHmPv www.facebook.com/badpandarecords twitter.com/#!/badpandarecords
(No streaming audio available)18689 plays - 9 plays
-
Info
- Summary
Technologist & entrepreneur focused on the intersection of the web and urban & social systems. Big believer in bottom-up, emergent, open, peer-to-peer innovation.
Experience- Apr 2013 - PresentAdvisor, Data-Smart City Solutions Initiative / Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Data-Smart City Solutions works to catalyze local government efforts to more effectively solve local problems through the use of integrated, cross-agency data combined with community data.
- Feb 2013 - PresentMentor / Tumml
Tumml is an "urban ventures accelerator" focused on empowering entrepreneurs to solve urban problems.
- Jan 2013 - PresentWebFWD Scout / Mozilla
Mozilla’s WebFWD takes the best of startup and open source principles to help open Web innovators build successful companies.
- Jan 2013 - PresentAdvisor / Living Cities
Living Cities is a collaborative of 22 of the world's largest foundations working to improve the lives of low-income people and the cities where they live.
- Jan 2012 - PresentAdvocate in Residence / Union Square Ventures
Immersed in tech policy; scheming about using the internet to protect the internet.
- Nov 2011 - PresentVisiting Scholar / MIT Media Lab
Exploring the intersection of media, tech and civic issues at the Center for Civic Media.
- Jan 2010 - PresentAdvisor / Code for America
It's like Teach for America for geeks.
- Mar 2011 - Dec 2011Managing Director, Civic Commons / Code for America
Consulted with cities on technology strategy, supported the re-use of open source apps for cities, and supported the Open311 web standard.
- Aug 2007 - Apr 2011Director of OpenPlans Labs / Civic Works / OpenPlans
Led an incubator for technology initiatives & businesses, working with an amazing team of ~20 developers, designers and community managers.
Projects included:
* Open311 (open web standard for reporting civic issues, deployed in ~50 cities worldwide)
* MTA Bus Time (NYC's open data platform for real-time bus locations)
* OpenTripPlanner (world's largest open source software project for public transit)
* OpenPlans Transportation (enterprise open source business serving transportation market)
* Civic Works (web application development studio focused on civic engagement)
* NY Transit Data (open data advocacy & developer organizing campaign)
* Civic Commons (open technology resource center, now Code for America Commons)
* TransportationCamp (unconference series)
* Urban Systems Collaborative (conference series)
* and lots of other things, some of which worked and many of which didn't.Clients, partners & funders included: City of NY, City of SF, District of Columbia, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (NY), Portland TriMet, IBM, The Boston Globe, Rockefeller Foundation, Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, MacArthur Foundation.
- Apr 2006 - Aug 2007Product Manager / OpenPlans
Produced websites and web applications focused on urban isuses. Projects included Streetsblog.org & the Streetsblog Network, Streetfilms.org, GothamSchools.org and UncivilServants.org.
- Oct 2002 - Apr 2006Project Manager / Project for Public Spaces
Studied patterns of activity in public spaces and made recommendations for improvements. Projects included: Times Square (NYC); Washington Square Park (NYC); Jamaica Transit Station Area (NYC); Littleton, NH; Lincoln, NE; Newark, NJ. Developed and managed web applications.
- 2000 - 2003Ballboy / US Open
Yes, I was basically an adult when I did this. But it was awesome.
Education-
2001 - 2019The InternetProgramming, web development, web design, philosophy of technology
-
1997 - 2001Stanford UniversityBA in Urban Studies
-
Repositories
- / Pushed Jan 15, 13
- / Pushed Dec 27, 12
- / Pushed Dec 20, 12
- 1 fork / Pushed Dec 02, 12
- 1 fork / 3 watchers / Pushed Jul 24, 12
- Simple bookmarklet to push content into the civic commons marketplace1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed May 23, 12
- 1 watcher / Pushed Apr 26, 12
- A full featured PHP API Client for 37signals' Highrise1 watcher / Pushed Apr 03, 12
- 2 watchers / Pushed Nov 16, 10
- 1 watcher / Pushed Oct 14, 10
- An open source multi-modal trip planner123 forks / 313 watchers / Pushed May 25, 13
- An open source bus/transit customer information system (CIS) that offers users realtime arrival information via a desktop and mobile website, via SMS and via a "DIY Sign".4 forks / 10 watchers / Pushed May 24, 13
- Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA)58 forks / 625 watchers / Pushed May 21, 13
- Explore Cook County's budget from 1993 to 2012 and learn how the money is being spent.12 forks / 20 watchers / Pushed Nov 21, 12
- 2 watchers / Pushed Oct 04, 12
- 1 fork / 6 watchers / Pushed Aug 14, 12
- 1 fork / 3 watchers / Pushed Jul 24, 12
- 21 forks / 72 watchers / Pushed Jul 09, 12
- Simple bookmarklet to push content into the civic commons marketplace1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed May 23, 12
- 1 watcher / Pushed Apr 26, 12
- A full featured PHP API Client for 37signals' Highrise1 watcher / Pushed Apr 03, 12
- 1 fork / 8 watchers / Pushed Mar 21, 12
- A local copy of OneBusAway application-modules, maintained to be stable as compared to trunk. Intended for production use.6 watchers / Pushed Mar 08, 12
- 4 watchers / Pushed Dec 20, 11
- Utilities to supplement the cause of Fight for the Future.2 watchers / Pushed Dec 13, 11
- Our tool for micro-network building across our social networks5 forks / 15 watchers / Pushed Nov 21, 11
- 1 fork / 7 watchers / Pushed Sep 21, 11
- 2 watchers / Pushed Sep 02, 11
- 1 fork / 6 watchers / Pushed Aug 03, 11
