Open-Government Techies Get Giddy About a Council Bill; But Will Bloomberg Care?

council.nyc.gov

Brewer.

The Bloomberg administration is generally perceived as progressive when it comes to giving citizens access to municipal data. Dozens of reports and statistics from city agencies are just a click away on nyc.gov, and New York's 311 information service was a significant logistical achievement, even if the technology behind it—the telephone!—now seems a bit archaic.

But there's a growing demand among transparency advocates for a more comprehensive and sophisticated level of data sharing.

The latest sign: a new bill making its rounds in the City Council that would create unprecedented open data standards for New York City government.

The bill, which is being spearheaded by Gale Brewer, who chairs the Council's Technology in Government Committee, is up for a public hearing on June 29. It would compile all of the city’s public data on a single Web site, like data.nyc.gov, as well as making the data available in a raw, machine-readable format so that programmers could develop useful online and mobile applications out of it.

“The requirement for an open and flexible data format will allow New York City tech entrepreneurs and web developers to interact with the City in exciting new ways,” said Ms. Brewer in an email. Her co-sponsors on the bill are Jessica Lappin, Sara Gonzalez, John Liu, Letitia James and Thomas White Jr.

The legislation would also require that public records—reports and statistics from all city departments and agencies, for instance—be updated on the proposed Web site as often as necessary, and would establish an Internet records policy and a manual with guidelines for “e-government” standards.

The bill reflects a broader push for government transparency and the opening up and centralization of data, as exemplified by the Obama administration's much-hyped launch of the federal data Web site data.gov on May 21. Earlier in May, the New York State Senate (before the chamber devolved into chaos) launched a new Internet portal of its own, nysenate.gov, which features a host of Web applications previously unavailable to its users. The Open NYSenate initiative launched about a month later at open.nysenate.gov.

NYC.gov does have some useful data features, like the mapping application NYCityMap, an interactive Web application for neighborhood services. But people want more. Take 311. Granted there is an online component to the service, but in an age of vastly accessible wireless Internet and smart phones, it seems like the logical next step would be to open up the 311 data so citizen programmers could get their hands on it, which is precisely what a handful of techies proposed in a letter delivered to Mr. Bloomberg last month.

Naturally, there was a ripple of buzz in tech and open-government circles earlier this week when Ms. Brewer’s legislative aide circulated an email about the bill.

“I think it’s great,” said Matt Cooperrider, organizer of the OpenGovNYC meet-up, after perusing the legislation for the first time on Monday. Mr. Cooperrider has arranged for Ms. Brewer to host a workshop about the legislation this Saturday at Participation Camp, a free “unconference” on citizen participation in government. “The city has moved quickly in response to the popular call for this data,” he added.

“With something like 311, the city has demonstrated that it can really use technology to push an idea further, but so far it hasn’t been too open and inclusive about letting entities from outside the city participate in that,” said Philip Ashlock, a Web designer at The Open Planning Project (TOPP) who’d also just heard about the bill on Monday. “This would present lots of opportunities to connect citizens more directly with their representatives on very specific issues, and remove the complexity and bureaucracy that’s perceived when people think of government on any scale.”

Mr. Ashlock cited, for example, a recent TOPP project to create a real-time bus-tracking tool. The organization had to file repeated FOIA requests with the Department of Transportation to get ahold of some of the data needed to develop it, he said, noting that those steps would be eliminated if the open data legislation passed.

The passage of the bill would make New York City a leader in municipal open government initiatives on the national scale, said Andrew Hoppin, chief information officer for the New York State Senate and the driving force behind nysenate.gov.

Mr. Hoppin cited Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Seattle as examples of cities with high open government and technology standards, but said that most of their progress in those areas has been on the level of individual city agencies taking it upon themselves to adopt best practices for data sharing. He said he didn’t know of any U.S. cities that had mandated data-openness through legislation—although, up north, Vancouver’s city council recently passed a motion to adopt open data standards.

“New York City is really gonna lead the charge here,” said Mr. Hoppin, speaking from outside the Senate Chamber in Albany on Tuesday. He said he’ll be at City Hall Monday afternoon to testify at the Technology in Government Committee’s first hearing on the bill, which, perhaps inopportunely, coincides with day one of this year’s Personal Democracy Forum conference. (Obvious disclosure: This Web site is a collaboration with PDF.)

Kunal Malhotra, Ms. Brewer's budget and legislation director, said her office was confident the Council would pass the bill, but that it might take a few months of dialogue and debate before that happens. He also said they anticipate Mr. Bloomberg might have concerns that the cost and implementation of the bill could become "burdensome."

"We are expecting hesitation on the administration's part," he said.

Mr. Bloomberg's office declined to comment for this article since the bill has not yet had a public hearing. But Marc LaVorgna, a Bloomberg spokesman, pointed us to the NYCStat page on nyc.gov, which, as mentioned above, links to a variety of data, reports, and statistics related to city services.

Mr. Malhotra said Ms. Brewer hopes the Council will move on the bill by the fall. If it succeeded, public records would be centralized online and opened up to developers in three phases depending on their complexity, with all of the city’s public information becoming available on the proposed data Web site by July 1, 2013.