A Hyperlocal News Website…

Turn civic data into news by connecting sources such as crime reports, 311 service requests, building permits and more.

Aggregate all your local news and data from many sources onto local maps.

Really local - down to a single block!

Browse by location (neighborhood, zip code, block etc) or by content type (local news, crime reports, restaurant inspections, etc).

Provide user-defined locations, custom feeds and custom email alerts.

… or a Hyperlocal News Engine

Enhance your existing website by adding local geotagged content.

Quickly geotag all your articles so you can search for them by location or configure widgets you can embed in your existing website.

Serve geotagged RSS feeds and a full API (Application Programming Interface) for all of your stories and data.

Read the OpenBlock feature list for more.

OpenBlock is open source

OpenBlock is Open Source Software, meaning that it can be downloaded and installed for free (under the GPL license). It leverages many well established open-source technologies, notably Django, Python, PostGIS, and OpenLayers.

OpenBlock has been under active development over the past year, and we released a stable 1.0 in late August 2011. We have excellent documentation. Interested developers should head to OpenBlock on GitHub, and to the Developer site, where you'll find our roadmap, tickets and wiki.

Who’s behind OpenBlock?

OpenBlock began life as the open-source code released by Everyblock.com in June 2009. Originally created by Adrian Holovaty and the Everyblock team, it is now developed as an open-source (GPL) project at http://openblockproject.org.

Funding for both the initial creation of Everyblock and OpenPlans' ongoing development of OpenBlock was provided by the Knight Foundation.

Meet users and developers in our OpenBlock Google Group. You can usually find the development team in the #openblock channel on irc.freenode.net.