For all you .NET wonks out there, I had some serious trouble finding the solution that fit my business (CitySourced – http://www.citysourced.com) when it came to processing geo spatial elements. Yes, there’s the SQL Server 2008 and their new spatial types (which I use as well), but there was nothing that allowed me to work with geo spatial elements directly in my .NET application. We’re now using ESRI’s ArcGIS 10technology for a lot of the heavy lifting at CitySourced, but there is definitely a need for doing some of this in-application.

That being said, I’ve collected the libraries that were most useful to me and zipped them up. I’m doing this because the library I’m most fond of was the most difficult to find and get working – SharpMap 2.0 beta.

Download my .NET_GIS_Libraries

In addition to the download, I’ve decided to add links to all my favorite websites. Enjoy!

http://sharpmap.codeplex.com/
http://dotspatial.codeplex.com/
http://projnet.codeplex.com/
http://geoapi.codeplex.com/
http://mssqlspatial.codeplex.com/

And a great how to blog for SharpMap 2.0 – a must read!

http://geekswithblogs.net/JuanDoNeblo/archive/2008/04/13/showing-esri-shapefile-layers-on-a-virtual-earth-map.aspx

Now that CitySourced is on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, I’m a huge fan of what it offers both developers and startup companies. That being said, I wanted to put a quick note out there about a fix to a bug I found to help spread the knowledge I’ve gained getting into the nuts and bolts of it. With CitySourced, the original application was written in .NET (C#, 3.5 Framework), so the port was relatively simple. Once we started playing around with it though, the development app fabric kept crashing on us for no apparent reason. I searched Google (and Bing) and came up with nothing. Upon closer inspection of the code, it appears that if you redirect and specify the “EndResponse” flag as true, the app fabric bombs. So, in summary:

This BOMBS -> Response.Redirect(“~/my-new-url”, true);

This WORKS -> Response.Redirect(“~/my-new-url”, false);

I guess Azure doesn’t like ending the response prematurely. Luckily, we had abstracted any and all redirects to a utility class (eg, ContextUtil). So we updated our code in one place and viola! Our code worked perfectly.

I’ll be doing a pretty in depth post on our complete migration, what I like, what I didn’t like, etc. Stay tuned!

I don’t know if many of you know, but I founded a company called CitySourced recently. Very simply, we make it really easy to make your city a better place with your smartphone. See a pothole or some graffiti? Snap a picture of it with your iPhone and it automatically gets reported to City Hall. Cool, eh? Well, I think it is. (Granted, I’m really, really geeky) While our application works in over 1900 cities nationwide, we recently launched CitySourced as the official mobile platform for the City of San Jose. We held a download day on December 12th, and I have to say, the results are really impressive. In just a few days, hundreds of issues have been reported, and all those issues have been worked into the backend workflow of the city itself. The reports that get filed will be automatically updated when at various stages in the report lifecycle (submission, confirm receipt, resolved, etc.) This is just one of many cities to adopt our platform officially, and we’re excited to bring on many more as the new year approaches.

If you’d like to download the CitySourced application for your city, you can do so here (it’s completely free!) – http://itunes.apple.com/app/citysourced/id336854714

And if you have any issues that come up, please don’t hesitate to email them to me.

Enjoy the app, and have a very safe and happy holiday!

After reading a great article by the Sunlight Foundation on the failure to date of data.gov, I wanted to express my personal view on the matter. I’m a huge fan of openness and information being freely available. That was one of the main reasons I founded freedomspeaks.com and its corresponding set of APIs. After reading some of the comments to the Sunlight Foundation’s blog post, I was amazed at the faith people have in big government. I, personally, am not surprised one bit in the government’s inability to produce. In fact, I pretty much expected as much. If history has shown us anything, it’s that government, when left to its own devices, can’t produce anything viable or useful to its constituents (with the sole exception of a military and defense). The federal government’s answer to a downloadable dataset is a .PDF of a scanned document. While technically this is a “digital” document, and it would have the data contained therein, it’s pretty much worthless for someone trying to do anything of value with it. You might as well line the bird cage with it – you’ll actually get more use out of it that way. This is pretty much what I expected out of Uncle Sam. Which is why I’m a firm believer that it’s a private company that will succeed in this endeavor, that endeavor being, of course, FreedomSpeaks.

UPDATE: Also, I’d like to express my extreme discontent with the $17 Million use of proceeds to revamp the whitehouse.gov website. Ask any web developer, their site could have been developed in less time with only $170,000. This is a wonderful example of how the government constantly mismanages our taxpayer dollars. Honestly President Obama, do you know how much $17 Million would be to a internet startup? My gosh, that would be an unheard of Series A!

I’m writing publicly here to support Jason Calacanis’ jihad against angel investment groups and venture capitalists forcing entrepreneurs to pay to present their ideas. These organizations are an abomination, and I will not be a part of them. Jason’s annual TechCrunch50 conference really opened up some doors for my startup – CitySourced, and we didn’t have to pay a single dime to present. TC50 even threw in a couple comp tickets for the us (as they did all the presenters). Jason runs a real class act, and I appreciate him standing up to the little guy. Go JCal!

So my partner, Kurt Daradics, has lined up some really strong power intros into the California Republican Party (which is pretty insane, if you ask me). We had a great lunch with Matt Robbins, their political director, on Wednesday and he’s asked us to come up to their first annual tech summit and speak as to what we’re up to with FreedomSpeaks. We’re both really stoked on the reception our product is getting, and we’re excited to be an integral part of this new “Government 2.0″ initiative (cheesy, I know). Supposedly, there are going to be some heavy hitters at the summit tomorrow – Newt’s Director of New Media, the NRP’s Director of Media, and a handful of others. I’ll let you all know how it goes!

On a similar note, we’ll be pushing out our CitizenCamp concept soon – probably middle summer launch (maybe July 4 ~ish). The elevator pitch on that one is “online plus offline equals streamlined”. We are basically trying to take the concepts of FreedomSpeaks and adapt them to the offline world – taking our online social circles offline to greater impact civic and social change. We’ll have how to’s on any number of things – from how to start a petition to getting an initiative on the ballot to strategies on getting involved. Ultimately, we want people to give a damn. It’s time to wake up the neighborhood, y’all!

Thanks for tuning in. Feel free to contact me if you would like to get involved.

My friend Kurt Daradics & Baron Miller are having their monthly MOTM tonight. They’ve asked me to present my site, FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM and I’m honored by their invitation. The night will start off with drinks and networking, followed by my presentation, some Q&A, and finally some more networking. I hope to see everyone there. It should be a great night. More info follows:

When: Tonight, October 28th @ 8:00 PM
Where: Suki 7 in Westlake Village, CA
Who’s Going? Everyone who’s cool…

Be sure to bring a stack of your business cards!

Yep, the announcement came over the wire today (click here for the formal release). I was finally able to get FreedomSpeaks' API out the door. I'm really excited about this launch, I've been working hard on it for a few months now, and it's nice to see the fruition of my work. I still have quite a bit more work ahead of me, but the API will be driving pretty much everything. Here's a list of what you can do with the API (so far):

1. Get your officials based on your address
2. Get official data based on id/screen name. 
3. Get a letter based on id 
4. Write your own letter (and send it to your officials)
5. Forward a letter already written to your officials 
6. Search our database of officials 

We also have a widget (with a couple more due out soon) that members can embed in their blog, website or MySpace profile. This widget performs the "Get Officials" action and allows visitors to their site to lookup their officials. Pretty cool if you're into getting your friends politically involved.

I don't have a forum right now for the API, so if you want to leave comments about it, or have questions, just add a comment to my post. I'll try to answer every one in a timely manner.

Spread the word – Our API is Finally Here!

Below's a sample of our "Get Officials" Widget – Get Your Widget Code Now!

I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up. I have some exciting news about Freedom Speaks. I’ll be launching our API very soon! The API will have some barebones features to start, but I hope to make almost all the data on our site available through the API. Here are a couple of the features we’ll be launching with:

1. Who Represents You?
   (Enter: Your Address; Get: Your Districts + Officials)
2. Forward A Letter…
   (Enter: Any LetterId + Address; Get: Your Districts + Officials + Your Letter Sent)
3. Get A Letter
   (Enter: Any LetterId; Get: Letter + Comments)
4. Get An Official
   (Enter: Any OfficialId; Get Official + Comments)
5. Search Officials
   (Enter: Search Terms; Get Officials)

The results sets will be pretty verbose and returned as Xml. You’ll be able to pick and choose what data you’d like to display within your application.

We’re also making available a few widgets that consume our API services. Embed any one of these widgets on your own profile, and you’ll instantly enable your visitors to take action on any issue you’d like! That’s pretty powerful stuff.

Stay Tuned!

An interesting event happened last night around 6 PM. I saw an unusual amount of activity on FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM and thought I may have a potential spammer on my hands. I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was it not a spammer, buy my site had become the target of a quite intriguing blog post by WONKETTE.COM. The story poked fun at the Senator, making light of the fact that he didn’t have any friends on my site. If you follow the comments on WONKETTE.COM, I think you’ll find (as I did) the comments are pretty amusing. Some might say that it isn’t right that we add fodder to the fire of a political scandal, but politicians are fair game in my books. More often than not, they tout themselves as pillars of society. We all know that that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

So, I’d like to give a shout out to the WONKETTE.COM. One final thought. Now that Senator Larry Craig has over 20 friends, what do we do about Senators Obama, Clinton and McCain? They don’t even come close! Maybe Senator Craig should be running for president.