Matt Cooperrider

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.

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.

On March 8, Council Speaker Christine Quinn proposed creating a mobile application for the city's 311 information line. That way, if someone was trying to find out where the nearest library is or if his car got towed, instead of actually having to speak with an operator—a quaint and perhaps annoying step in the age of the smart phone—his handheld device could just pull up the the same information that 311's call center reps would access from their database.

"You look around New York on the subway, on the ferry, you see almost everybody with some kind of hand-held device, an iPhone, a Blackberry, " Ms. Quinn told the Daily News. "The idea here is to keep growing as technology expands to be more efficient."

But members of the city's tech community want to take that idea a step further. They're proposing an Open 311 system in which the city would free up its 311 data to programmers who could develop savvy custom Web applications out of it.