Under Open Data Law, New York City Begins Herding Its Data
BY Miranda Neubauer | Monday, March 11 2013
New York City had until last Thursday to meet the first deadline set in its now year-old open data law by making data already published on nyc.gov available in machine-readable format, rather than in PDF format. According to a city press release, there are now over 1,000 data sets available on New York City's Open Data platform. The platform launched in October of 2011 with 750 data sets, 250 of which were new at the time. Since the law was signed in March of last year, New York City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) has been working with agencies to add 350 new data sets to the platform and worked to add regularly updated feeds to existing data sets. Read More
Once Relics of a City's Past, Now in Plans for a Digital Future
BY Sam Roudman | Tuesday, February 5 2013
In the 1900s, these tunnels hauled freight under downtown Chicago. Will they carry fiber-optic cable next? Photo: Wikimedia
Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus: As leading city governments across the country consider how to approach the Internet age, they're taking the concept of "adaptive reuse" to a new frontier by thinking of new ways to turn old standbys like payphones or disused rail tunnels into new pieces of digital infrastructure. Read More
City CIOs See Inspiration for Civic Hackers in New Federal Portal for City Data
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, August 3 2012
With the launch of a new U.S. City Data Portal housed online by the federal government, a group of the nation's largest city chief information officers are hoping that some day developers will take the records New York City keeps on restaurants and combine it with other cities' comparable data to create new applications that could be of use to both the public and people in government. Read More
In New York, Landmark Open Data Legislation Will Soon Be Up for a Vote
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, February 28 2012
The New York City Council is expected to vote on a far-reaching open data bill on Wednesday that would codify many of the principles articulated by open government advocates in recent years. If made law, the bill would go further than San Francisco's pioneering 2010 open data law in depth and scope, obliging agencies to provide data online in machine-readable format though a single, citywide portal. But perhaps in a nod to the amount of work involved in working through large volumes of existing data, city agencies won't have to make theirs available through the city's portal until the end of 2018. Read More
New York City Announces BigApps 3.0
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, October 12 2011
A $10,000 grand prize is now on offer for the third NYC BigApps competition, announced last night. Launched in 2009 as of the earliest contests challenging developers to build applications specifically for denizens of a ... Read More
Seeing the Snow for the Blizzard: Using Mobile for Government Oversight
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, January 11 2011
Over on his company blog, Mobile Commons*' Jed Alpert has a quick Q&A with the digital editor of WNYC's program The Takeaway, Jim Colgan, about a project the public radio station did to allow New Yorkers to document ... Read More
