To adopt one of Boston’s 13,000+ public hydrants, go to http://boston.adoptahydrant.org. Once you sign in, you can choose and name – the hydrant(s) you would like to volunteer to shovel out. You will receive a confirmation email with your hydrant location(s) and shoveling tips as well as friendly reminders when snowstorms hit.

The Adopt-A-Hydrant application was developed by Erik Michaels-Ober, a Code for America fellow, who served with the City of Boston in 2011. The City is piloting the application this year. If successful, the City will explore how this application could be used to encourage adoption of other streetscape features, such as trees. The app also is available for other places to use and, todate, three cities – Chicago, Honolulu, and Buenos Aires – already have expressed an interest in adapting it for use by their residents.

This challenge focuses on encouraging the development of apps that help Boston resident use the MBTA and New Balance Hubway to travel through the Boston area.  These apps will highlight the transit connections between these two low cost and environmentally friendly transportation systems.  As a bonus, developers are asked to develop apps that aid area residents in learning about and getting to Boston’s food trucks.

For more details on the developers challenge, visit http://t.co/AJ1emesG.

To check out some of the City data & ideas for the challenge, visit www.newurbanmechanics.org/challenge/

Questions?  Comments?  Email us at developers@cityofboston.gov

Have you ever see an old building in Boston and wondered about its history?  Or wanted to share a comment about the building’s current use, or suggest how it could be even better?  In Fields Corner, you can now do this – thanks to the works of the Fields Corner Collaborative and its My Dot Tour program.

Through this program seven teenagers spent their summer researching the history of eight sites throughout Fields Corner.  This August, these youth led walking tours of the neighborhood for residents and visitors, sharing local history and their views on the neighborhood and its future.

Hello Mayor Menino.  Thanks very much for talking to us today about your Challenge.  Potholes are a routine problem for cities, especially in areas where harsh winter weather and snow plows take their toll.  How do you expect this Challenge will help Boston better address the pothole problem?

In 2010, the City received nearly 4,000 pothole reports from constituents and filled over 7,000 potholes, making it one of our biggest service issues.  This Challenge will enhance Street Bump, which is our app for smart phones that helps to detect when a car hits a pothole.  The better this app is able to detect potholes, the sooner our Public Works crews will be able to fill them. No one likes hitting a pothole.  But with Street Bump, if you hit a pothole, the City could get notified and we can hopefully respond before it can be hit again.  We maintain over 800 miles of roadway, so improvements in this process will have a big impact on the drivers, cyclists and pedestrians using the streets throughout our City.

What led you to post this Challenge on the InnoCentive web site?

I am a strong believer that the best results come from engaging the public.  InnoCentive allows us to do just that.  Through the InnoCentive platform, Boston will have access to over 250,000 of the world’s most creative minds, providing them with the opportunity to address one of Boston residents’ biggest issues.  The fundamental premise of Street Bump relies on citizens to help the City collect data on road conditions, so it’s also a natural for us to turn to the global community of Solvers to help find the best algorithm to analyze that data.

To read the rest of the interview, please visit the Perspectives on Innovation Blog.

(The ideas in Arel’s report are Arel’s alone and should not be read as an official stance of the City of Boston.)

• Early stage start-ups can be better supported, and

• Community is critically important.

Some effective ways to address these issues are:

• Focusing on Innovation centers, clustering, and networking,

• Effective external and internal promotion and communication, and

• Promoting changes to Massachusetts’ laws on non-compete agreements.

Participants of the challenge posted business plans on VenCorps’s on-line platform where an open community of venture capitalists, business leaders and community members voted on which plan was best. By receiving the highest ranking, My Life List was named winner and was awarded $50,000 in equity investment from VenCorps to expand in Boston’s Innovation District.

My Life List is a social networking platform targeted to goal achievers.  Through this site, people can share, support and celebrate their achievement of life goals as well as the life goals of others.  Bill Starr is the CEO of My Life List.

The announcement of the Innovation District Challenge winner took place at the offices of Bocoup in the Innovation District. Bocoup builds and scales web application; it provides additional office space as an incubator for open source developers.

The nine finalists of the Welcome Home Challenge, who all received the highest rankings through the first round of public voting, represented a diverse range of industries, from biotech to equipment rentals, from mobile analytics to social networking.       In addition to My Life List, the finalists included:

• Buzzient Enterprise: Buzzient Enterprise is a SaaS product that integrates social media data and analytics with CRM applications.  Buzzient is the only privately held company today that is able to integrate social media with multiple, heterogeneous CRM applications from Oracle, Salesforce.com, and others.

• Grinnit: Grinnit makes it easy to gather and organize photos from a group of contributors, directly from your smartphone.  Grinnit works like a personalized camera that knows who you are and uses the information in your smartphone and elsewhere on the web to organize and share photos.

• IdeaConnection: IdeaConnection provides businesses with innovative, high quality, and timely solutions to their business and R&D challenges using teams of highly motivated experts located throughout the world led by world-class facilitators.

• Media Armor: Media Armor is a data-driven reporting and analytics company focused on measuring the impact mobile display advertising has on consumer behavior.

• Relay Technology Management, Inc.: Relay Technology Management has developed the Innovation Engine – a web-based analytics approach to identify promising drug candidates from academic research institutions and early-stage biotechnology companies.

• Rentabilities: Rentabilities makes renting easy. Have you ever rented anything, like a chainsaw, a kayak, or a party tent? We aim to be Amazon.com for renting. We’re launching one site where you can find and rent anything without picking up the phone.

• Stereonic LLC: Stereonic is dedicated to development and marketing of Fluorescent Nanoscopy technology – a technology for optical microscopy suited for 3D color live cell imaging with resolution down to 2nm. We develop devices and protocols tuned for basic research, pharma development, diagnostics, materials design and other tasks.

• TapWalk: Your favorite mobile navigation app just drops you at the street address. TapWalk takes you inside as your personal concierge, always with you- is there a sushi restaurant behind security? What is this modern painting about? Answers when and where you need them.

The prototype version of the application was built in collaboration with Citizapps, a partnership between Fabio Carrera, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Joshua Thorp and Stephen Guerin of the Santa Fe Complex.  If run while driving, Street Bump collects data from the phone’s sensors.  The phone’s built-in GPS can pinpoint the location of the phone while the phone’s accelerometers can detect when the phone – and thus the car or bike – are riding over any potholes.  The Street Bump collects this data hands free.

Now the City is looking to make the app even better.  Through Innocentive’s challenge platform, scientists and software programmers from around the world are being invited to make improvements to the app.  The best improvements will receive awards, courtesy of a $25,000 grant from Liberty Mutual for this project.

Some of the improvements that are being solicited include algorithms to help pinpoint potholes; a method to report to the City automatically when a pothole is detected; and an enhanced design for the app.  Innocentive, a local company, is providing their platform for free as part one of its Public Good Challenges.

This project builds off the successful crowd-sourced app development efforts of Washington, DC and New York City, as well as Innocentive’s Public Good Campaign in places such as Chicago.

To learn more about Street Bump or to participate in the challenge, please visit our Street Bump page.

This winter, the Boston Transportation Department launched its Complete Streets website, a one-stop shop on Boston’s efforts to puts pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users on equal footing with motor-vehicle drivers.  The initiative aims to improve the quality of life in Boston by creating streets that are both great public spaces and sustainable transportation networks.  It embraces innovation to address climate change and promote healthy living.

On this website, which was built with the support of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the Department of Innovation & Technology, you can check out projects across the city that are changing the way people and goods will travel in Boston.  Those projects fall into one of three areas:

• Green: Infrastructure that reduces the carbon footprint of transportation and increases the sustainability of the city;

• Smart: Investments that increase the efficiency and convenience of transportation by collecting, analyzing and sharing timely data with everyone from transportation planners and managers to Boston residents and visitors; and,

• Multi-modal: Projects that encourage constituents to use modes of transportation besides cars and facilitate the easy switch from one mode of transportation to another (e.g. from a bicycle to mass transit.)

To learn more about the initiative, check out the website or email the Complete Streets team at feedback@bostoncompletestreets.org.

IBM will work with with 100 cities over the next three years, providing consulting services and technical assistance to address some of the most pressing urban issues. The City of Boston has entered this challenge, looking for new approaches in three of the areas that residents are most interested in: traffic & transportation, neighborhood quality of life, and youth education.

1. Complete Streets Sensor Pilot

Supposedly born from cow paths, Boston’s streets are legendary for ensnaring residents and visitors alike in traffic and one-way mazes.  To combat this, Boston has launched the Complete Streets program, an effort to make our streets multi-modal, green & smart.  One element of the Complete Streets program – and the focus of this pilot – is using sensors to collect transportation data that will help us improve our transportation policies.

2. Boston About Results

Attention to the basic city services has made Boston’s neighborhoods, by any measure, some of the strongest in the nation.  After a sustained focus on optimizing individual department performance, the City is now exploring how to improve operations through closer collaboration across departments.  Through this engagement with IBM, we hope to build the data infrastructure needed to surface key opportunities for this cross-department collaboration.

3. Boston.edu

Mayor Menino’s goal is to make Boston the best city in the world for youth.  To achieve this, the City and its non-profit partners are working to coordinate their programs, creating a seamless network of engaging, accessible and relevant educational opportunities.  Underpinning this effort is an IT infrastructure that we hope to design with IBM Smarter cities.

Each of these projects will enhance our ability to collect, analyze and act upon information pouring in from a variety of systems, so that Boston can be an even better place for its residents and businesses.

Boston is eager to break new ground in piloting these ideas in collaboration with the IBM Research Division, in particular. This world-wide network of researchers is an incredible resource that can help the City of Boston to re-invent how the public and local government can collaborate to solve the pressing issues of cities.

… and we’ll get a little smahter, too (if possible!).

In addition to acting as a picture identification, the card serves as an “all-in-one” pass that gives each student the ability to ride the MBTA, withdraw books from public libraries, and attend afterschool programs at community centers. The 535 students of the school also use their cards to swipe for food service in the cafeteria and for attendance when they arrive to school. All these functions are possible through barcodes printed on the cards and one RFID chip within the card.

The involved organizations believe that enabling easy access to City services is important. But more so, they aim to support students’ academic achievement. The ID cards are meant to be a tool putting available resources in the hands of the students. The expectation is that when a student uses their card every day at school, they will be reminded of all the programs available citywide for their enrichment and be encouraged to participate.

The engaged partners will evaluate the pilot this year to inform if and how the program can be expanded to more middle and high schools in the district. To learn more about this project, get involved with it, or if you have any questions or comments, please email dana.conroy@cityofboston.gov.