Open 311

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Public Advocate candidate (and former two-term Public Advocate) Mark Green is jumping on the bandwagon with his his latest policy paper, “Government 2.0: New Technology for a New Democracy," the proposals of which generally fall in line with the good government initiatives—like open data, open 311 and universal broadband—being pushed by the city's tech community and certain elected officials.

The document includes 30 proposals for using "new technology to make government more accessible, transparent, participatory and collaborative," according to a press release sent out this afternoon.

We'll have an update on the city's open government movement later today or tomorrow, with reporting from Monday night's OpenGovNYC meetup. But in the meantime, you can read Mr. Green's full Gov 2.0 report here, or check out a few highlights after the jump.

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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.

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.