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
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Tweets
- 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…
- "in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution..." http://t.co/K6rI86ekfF
- Riding on Services | The Slow Hunch http://t.co/gJfpiI9C59
- "Bike lanes led to 49% increase in retail sales" http://t.co/p0KnZXv7Yo
- Beautiful floating sculpture here (@ MIT @MediaLab — Building E14) [pic]: http://t.co/5mzVJM9Xu2
- yes, and what a great article. RT @FAKEGRIMLOCK: "GLITTER TRACTION" FAVORITE NEW WORD! http://t.co/ZEHUVMvBeE
- Enjoying the tweets from @ppi's #regimprovement event - Regulating in the Digital Age: http://t.co/NxrSIY783Y
- RT @daeaves: Exciting news! White House Executive Order - Open & Machine Readable the New Default for Gov Information http://t.co/zSWQy…
- GovTrack is such a great resource. Thanks @JoshData!! http://t.co/ce7U8BZ4zO
- RT @cjoh: Open Data Policy is out. It's fantastic. Now the question is whether or not Agencies will execute: http://t.co/CrG39wXzZ4
- RT @DisCo_Project: .@BobLitan: When Google announced Google Fiber in Provo and Austin, AT&T reacted. That's competition. #regimprovement
- RT @urbnfutr: How We've Ignored the Complex Simplicity of the Manhattan Street Grid - http://t.co/h6iIpn72ZV - by Mackenzie Keast
- Great post on the quandary we're facing with privacy and the internet by @albertwenger http://t.co/DK1BO1IctQ
- Schumer Taking a Whack at Patent Trolls | The Slow Hunch http://t.co/OlUuxCV3j3
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Posts
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
This is a problem that is unique to software. We wouldn’t permit in any other area of technology the sorts of claims that appear in thousands of different software patents. Pharmaceutical inventors don’t claim “an arrangement of atoms that cures cancer,” asserting their patent against any chemical, whatever its form, that achieves that purpose. Indeed, the whole idea seems ludicrous. Pharmaceutical patent owners invent a drug, and it is the drug that they are entitled to patent. But in software, as we will see, claims of just that form are everywhere.
Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School, on the problem of “functional claiming”, or “patenting the problem, not the solution.”
from The Patent Quality Improvement Act on usv.com
- Schumer Taking a Whack at Patent Trolls
Today I’ve got a post up on the USV blog about Senator Chuck Schumer’s Patent Quality Improvement Act, and the problem of software patents and patent trolls in general.
The PQIA would make it easier and cheaper to defend against frivolous patent infringement suits. This isn’t everything we need to fix the problem, but it’s a step.
Let’s give Schumer some twitter love for making this a priority and taking a crack at it.
- Powered by Us
The week before last, I attended the Mesh Conference in SF, which brought together a big group of folks working at the intersection of the web and the “new economy”: i.e., the “sharing economy”, “peer economy”, “connection economy”, “collaborative consumption”, “the mesh”, etc. As you might imagine, a large part of the discussion focused on the lexical problem that this “movement” faces, with all of these overlapping and somewhat competing terms that attempt to describe it.
I’ve written about this problem before — and it’s true that any discussion with folks working around this space has to struggle to avoid falling into the “what do we call this?” trap. Which is annoying, but I do think necessary. It’s clear that there’s an unfulfilled need to try and describe what we see happening here in a way that really connects. While the words we’ve tried so far do make sense, I don’t think they yet create an appropriately wide tent, and I definitely don’t think they resonate with folks outside the tech community bubble.
As I was thinking about this on my way home from the Mesh, it struck me that maybe there is a common theme that runs through all of this. At the heart of all of these platforms and communities is the fact that they are people-powered. They exist to super-charge people — to turn them into superheroes. They empower people and are powered by people.
They are powered by us.
At USV, we talk a lot about how “networks” are a fundamentally new kind of entity. Whether you’re talking about marketplaces like Etsy, Zaarly, or GoodEggs, communities like Tumblr or Indaba, or funding platforms like Kickstarter or Kiva, they all share a common theme: that they are people-powered. The platform is simply a lightweight architecture which allows people to connect and transact directly with one another on top of it.
Of course, you would be correct to note that all companies and industries are powered by people, whether you’re talking about school teachers, auto workers, or movie executives. But there’s a difference between traditional companies and these new people-powered networks. Buying a car from GM is about buying something from a company. Buying a lamp on Etsy is about buying from a person. Getting a record deal with a label involves people, but building a music career on a network like Indaba and getting your album funded on Kickstarter is powered by us.
In each of these cases, the companies and organizations (nonprofits like Wikipedia or the Freelancers Union) at the center of this aren’t traditional bureaucratic hierarchies — they are networks, and what they do is help people connect with one another directly in new, exciting, and groundbreaking ways. The connection is the service, and what’s being connected is us.
Nicco Mele calls this “the end of big” — and argues (correctly, I think) that this is not just a passing fad (like “social networking”), but a fundamental shift in society. And for all the opportunity it brings, it also presents new challenges as we work to hold on to the most fundamental societal values (safety, accountability, freedom, privacy). He’s right, and part of the puzzle here is to create a policy environment that honors and protects those values while leaving ample room for us to explore “powered by us” approaches that have never been possible before now.
After two centuries of de-personalization through industrialization, we’re now flooded with new ways to both re-discover individuality and community, while simultaneously tackling huge social and economic problems (education, health, energy, transportation). And just to make sure I include the word “awesome” in this post at least once, I’ll end by saying that this is all pretty awesome and exciting.
I’m happy to know we are the worst,” Dylan Germick said. “It’s like getting a zero on the SAT. You need to know the right answers to get the wrong answers. … We’re also serious about not being serious. I think we hit the nail on the head.
What’s next for you in your work/creative world? “Crafting a dance song that will literally take people’s pants off for them.
Dylan Charles Germick’s Profile - The Bold Italic - San Francisco
This guy is amazing. His band is Planet Booty.
Lots ‘o CitiBikes coming to the neighborhood by the end of May. (this is East Village / Tompkins park area btw)
Upcoming Boston Magazine cover. All these shoes were used in the marathon. Love this.
(Found via a @danprimack RT)
- The peer economy
I am writing this post from the balcony of my Airbnb apartment in nob hill in sf.
Its by far the nicest place I’ve ever stayed in sf. Beautiful duplex penthouse, with an amazing view of downtown, for less than the price of a hotel room.
To get here, I hopped a ride via Lyft, with a super nice guy.
I guess this is my first travel experience fully powered by the peer economy. And is super awesome all around.
It just goes to show that you can travel and transport yourself via peer to peer means and have a totally normal, and exceptionally awesome experience.
This is something you can’t do in most places - sf is definitely the best testing ground for this kind of thing right now.
But for sure: the experience is more authentic and more enjoyable than would have been possible otherwise.
As much as all of this is mainstream in the tech community discussion, its still pretty outside the norm for most people.
But this weeks experience has definitely demonstrated to me that we have new and reliable ways of establishing trust with others, which are totally real and effective.
Pretty cool.
- 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
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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
Lead 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
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1997 - 2001Stanford UniversityBA in Urban Studies
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Repositories
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- 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
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- An open source multi-modal trip planner122 forks / 311 watchers / Pushed May 21, 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 21, 13
- Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA)57 forks / 612 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
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- 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
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- 1 fork / 6 watchers / Pushed Aug 03, 11
