Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose.

You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps spark lots of great work.

But what about EveryBlock.com proper, now that the grant period is over? We've put a lot of love into this project over the past two years, and we're going to continue operating the site as a private company. Beyond continuing our steady expansion of new cities and more data types in existing cities, we have some exciting ideas planned around revolutionizing the whole EveryBlock experience itself. We're only getting started. :-)

As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We've been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we've been building the site, we've come across a number of types of information that don't exactly fit the EveryBlock mold.

For example, an architectural group named "Chicago 7 Most Endangered Buildings" in January. That's geographically relevant news (i.e., if you live near one of those endangered buildings, you'd likely be interested in knowing about it), but because it's such a "one-off" type of information, we haven't done anything with it on EveryBlock. It didn't make much sense to add such a relatively obscure type of information to our list of news types.

To solve this problem, we've developed a concept of special reports -- one-time collections of recent geographic news that doesn't fit anywhere else on the site.

The first EveryBlock special report is a great one: Operation Crooked Code. A week or so ago, 15 people were arrested on bribery charges as part of a federal probe into corruption in Chicago city government. We've analyzed U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald's complaint documents and cataloged the specific addresses mentioned within. On the project's front page, you can view every location we found, along with a relevant excerpt from the complaint. You can sort this data in various ways, including a list and map of all the alleged bribe locations.

We've found that this really helps the news feel closer to home, so to speak. Hearing about these indictments in the news is one thing, but finding out a bribe allegedly took place at the Dunkin Donuts by your office puts things in a new perspective.

If you happen to live near any of these locations, you'll notice that the information shows up on your block page (example), with the rest of the local news you know and love.

We're looking forward to putting together more special reports. If you have any ideas, please let us know by e-mailing feedback at everyblock.com or using the feedback form at the bottom of any EveryBlock page. Let us know what you think!

(Cross-posted to the EveryBlock Blog.)

Our launch announcement gives more information about what we're trying to do.

We've still got a long way to go, but it's good to have this initial version out the door. Please let us know what you think! You can e-mail us at feedback at everyblock.com.

We've got a crack team of four working on the project: designer Wilson Miner, people person Dan O'Neil, developer Paul Smith and yours truly.

We're based in Chicago and share office space in the Loop with a great local cartographer and Chicago historian. Our office windows overlook the El tracks -- as Elwood Blues would say, the trains go by "so often that you won't even notice it."

If you're interested in getting notified when our site has been made public, please do send an e-mail to info at everyblock.com to say hello.