The project formerly known as Ether is now Civic Pheromones.

Imagine…

• Jose has an account on ioby.org, but his local rooftop farm decides to launch their campaign on Change By Us…
• Frank finds out about public meetings on bike lanes from BikeBlog, but the editors don’t know about the Flatbush meeting tomorrow, so he misses it…
• Emma follows a list of environmental groups, but the maintainer of the list goes to grad school…
• City Groups launches in Boston, but so does Yelp Community Edition…

Civic Pheromones are simple data feeds from civic websites. Pheromones transmit various useful pieces of information:

• where a project is based (geography)
• what’s going on (meetings, events)
• what the project does (topics, activities)
• where to find out more (blog, twitter, contact details)

There’s no “there” there for Pheromones. No new website to follow. Civic Pheromones are invisible. They’re all about transmission of useful information from existing sources. We want to strengthen existing civic sites and reduce the silo-effect as new ones emerge.

I’m aware that there’s tons going on in this space. Civic Pheromones might be another angle on existing services, already covered by current APIs and specs (/me looks at Open311). But I think there’s something more that could be done to aggregate civic activity. Over the coming weeks, I’m starting a social development process, reaching out for interesting conversations about what this could be and where it fits in, if at all. Going to be fun.