I'm a big fan of looking at open data sets published by towns and cities, and then coming up with creative ways to make that information easily accessible online.

I've seen towns and cities that aren't big enough to have the budget to make a great website that makes all of the city's data easy discoverable. But many of them publish open data sets, and you can use the data to create an interesting project that is also useful to the city's residents.

Many large cities publish lots of open data, too. In general, there are already lots of apps built with the data sets from large cities, so I prefer to focus on the smaller ones because doing so offers a chance to create something that hasn't been done before. You might find that the data published by larger cities is more interesting, though.

Here are a few links to get started:

https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/ https://data.boston.gov/ https://data.ny.gov/ http://data.ottawa.ca/ https://data.albanyny.gov/ http://www.a2gov.org/services/data/Pages/default.aspx