Gale Brewer

Brewer.

On Monday, June 29, a few hours before Gale Brewer was to attend the first City Council hearing on her sweeping open-data legislation, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a similar initiative during his live-Skyped keynote speech at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference—a contest called Big Apps, which is challenging software developers to create innovative Web applications out of data sets the city would make available in a programming-friendly format.

The announcement came as a surprise to Ms. Brewer, who said she had no knowledge of the mayor’s plans, and it seemed to overshadow her own proposal, which, unlike Big Apps, would open up all of the city’s public data to programmers and compile it on a single Web site. (The inaugural Big Apps would open up about 80 data sets based on “expressions of interest” submitted to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is administering the contest.)

As it turns out, the Bloomberg administration isn’t keen on Ms. Brewer’s bill. At the hearing that day, two administration officials testified that complying with the legislation would be burdensome and expensive—around $500 million, they said.

But Ms. Brewer, who chairs the Council’s Technology in Government Committee, is forging ahead. She stopped by the monthly OpenGovNYC meet-up at the downtown co-working space New Work City on Monday night, July 27, to give an update on where the legislation stands.

A few weeks ago, we did a post breaking down what's at stake for New York City as it prepares for the fast-approaching Aug. 14 deadline to apply for broadband infrastructure funding through the federal stimulus bill's Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

You can learn more about that tomorrow, July 28, when Council Technology in Government Committee Chair Gale Brewer and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications host a meeting about the city's BTOP application. It's scheduled for 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the third floor conference room of DCTV on Layfayette Street.

As Government Technology reported last week, municipal governments had expected to have 60 to 90 days to get their applications ready. But when the grant application guidelines were released on July 14, they provided only a month-long window, and now some local governments are scrambling to make the deadline.

In the weeks before the application guidelines were released, the city was collecting ideas from broadband service providers, non-profits and other agencies. At the time, DoITT's spokesman, Nick Sbordone, said the city wanted to "hit the ground running, so when these funds become available, we have a pretty solid idea of what some of the best practices are in terms of providing these services."

Read the letter Ms. Brewer's office sent out last week after the jump:

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On Wednesday evening, July 15, a day after Gov. David Paterson nominated former London transit chief Jay Walder to head the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a panel was convened at the Museum of the City of New York to discuss the future of the beleaguered agency.

Of course, much of the conversation, which was moderated by Henry Stern—a former councilman and parks commissioner who leads the museum’s Civic Talk series—centered, given the M.T.A.'s problems, necessarily on the past. For example: the lack of city tax revenues devoted to transit, how years of underfunding and subsequent borrowing put the M.T.A. tens of billions of dollars in debt, and—as the most vocal of the panelists put it—the failure of past leaders to “stand up” to the people who gave them their jobs.

“One of the things we need to consider as the new C.E.O. of the M.T.A. takes his position is: What are the fiduciary obligations—that is the duty to the system—of the leadership of the M.T.A.? As opposed to their duty to the people who appoint them—the mayor and the governor,” said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who was perhaps the most fiery political opponent of the mayor’s congestion pricing plan in 2007.

“That independence will be at the heart of whether Mr. Walder is able to succeed in bringing reform to the M.T.A.,” Mr. Brodsky said. “The law gives Mr. Walder a clear defense for the next time the mayor says, ‘Go build me a subway line to nowhere.’ Whether he will use that defense will become the chief measurement of his success or his failure.”

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Rendering of a forthcoming green
hotel at 100 Varick Street.

Two topics we've been following lately are open data and green buildings. Admittedly, we hadn't given any thought to how these topics intersect. But Bomee Jung, founder of GreenHomeNYC, has. A Web developer turned green affordable housing activist, Ms. Jung has contributed a lengthy piece on this topic to the Web site of The Sallan Foundation, a green think tank.

"Two transformative movements of our time are poised to slam together into a concoction no less delightful than the Peanut Butter Cup (particularly to green enthusiasts of geekly tendencies): the Open Data movement and high-performance green building," she writes.

Ms. Jung's analysis becomes fairly dense and, perhaps, difficult to follow at times, but her argument seems to boil down to the idea that if there was more data out there on green buildings, more green buildings would be built.

For instance, publicly available energy performance data could be used to verify performance claims:

Open data has been a hot topic this week, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement of the Big Apps contest at PdF on Monday, and a Council hearing that same day on Gale Brewer's proposed legislation to make all city data available in a raw, development-friendly format.

Azi Paybarah reported from the hearing, where it became apparent that the Bloomberg administration "disagrees pretty strongly" with Ms. Brewer's bill, citing concerns over cost.

But if you're interested in seeing how the hearing went for yourself, NYFi reader Joly MacFie has posted video of the entire thing on YouTube. Here's part one:

And you can find the rest here.

openplanningproject.org

Streetsblog's Aaron Naparstek.

At the end of day one of the Personal Democracy Forum Conference, as the majority of attendees mingled with beer and wine in hand during a post-conference cocktail hour, a group of about 20 good-government advocates, Web developers and general techie types gathered for a special session called Hacking the City.

According to the conference materials, the purpose of the event—which was something of a local supplement to the more nationally focused panels that had been taking place all day—was to discuss “how online journalism, advocacy and community-building tools are being used to hack the urban political machine, rewrite city government's operating system and transform city dwellers' relationship to their local politics in New York.”

The conversation was led by members of The Open Planning Project, DIYcity founder John Geraci, and Streetsblog editor-in-chief Aaron Naparstek, who began by opening up the floor to thoughts on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement earlier in the day of a new contest for Web developers to design online and mobile applications out of city data, which will soon be made available in a programming-friendly format ("opened up").

The contest, called Big Apps, takes a cue from Washington D.C.’s Apps For Democracy challenge, Mr. Naparstek noted. But, he asked, “What can we do” with city data here in New York City?

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Bloomberg administration officials just finished testifying at a City Council hearing at 250 Broadway on legislation that would require them to post more information online than ever.

Joe Pompeo previewed the legislation, and administration officials declined to comment on it at the time.

It is now clear that the administration disagrees pretty strongly, and views the potential requirements as a burden—the administration said complying with the legislation could cost as much as $500 million.

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This morning Mayor Michael Bloomberg kicked off the Personal Democracy Forum—a conference about the intersection of technology and politics—by announcing a new annual competition that awards cash prizes to Web developers who come up with innovative Internet and mobile applications using city data.

Mr. Bloomberg also said he'd take the grand-prize winner out to dinner.

For the first stage of the contest, which will be called Big Apps, the city will release what Bloomberg described as a “huge volume of data” from various city agencies. (That means the data will be made available in a machine-readable format that’s conducive to programming.) He gave the example of creating a mobile application out of the Health Department’s restaurant grades.

“What we’re trying to do here is create the connectedness that will benefit the city economically, civically and socially,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who was beamed in live on a huge projector screen via Skype. (He wasn’t able to attend the conference in person.)

The announcement appeared to be well-received by techies present at the conference, who quickly began spreading the word via (what else?) Twitter.

The mayor also said that when the “.nyc” top-level domain becomes available—that’s expected to happen in 2010—the city will create a Web site at data.nyc to house all of the data.

Here's a press release Councilwoman Gale Brewer's office just sent out on the open data standards bill we reported on yesterday:

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.