Fast Company

The first time I walked into New York City Council Member Ben Kallos’s District Office, I immediately recognized the layout: A pair of long tables occupied by laptop-facing 20-year-olds wearing jeans and hoodies...

“How do you like our startup office?” Kallos asked me, as he welcomed me into his glass-enclosed office with a smile.

Kallos is one of New York City’s newest members of the city council. He is a lawyer and former business owner who represents part of Manhattan’s Upper East Side as well as Roosevelt Island. But his experience as a coder–he’s worked with MySQL and PHP–is shaping his time on city council as much as any of his other credentials. Thus far, he’s proposed a host of open government bills and used technology to make his own work more open and accessible.

“We operate using Agile. We use Trello for task management. We do standing check-ins,” says Kallos. “So we’re using all the best practices of the world’s most nimble startups to run our government offices.”

"As we've interacted with people in the digital space, we kept finding that folks didn't want to send a tweet and a get a response saying to come to a hearing in person," says council member Ben Kallos, who chairs the city's governmental operations committee. "People want to be able to send a tweet saying they're in favor of a bill or opposed to a bill or think a bill needs to changed in a certain way and have that be in the official record."

It's unclear exactly what from the online commenting proposal exactly what format the online comments would take. It could mean a website designed specifically for public feedback on proposed legislation. Or it could even include entering tweets sent to city council members into the public record. The New York State Senate's recently redesigned website has incorporated similar features, allowing the general public to vote in favor or against bills, leave comments, and sign up for email updates on bills of interest.

When you hear about big data, you might think of nefarious data brokers selling your browsing history or governments demanding logs of your phone's GPS coordinates. But the data that overwhelms our modern world is just as often being used for good and can improve our lives in completely banal ways we don't even notice—like making the buses run on time.

At least that's what New York City Council Member Ben Kallos is hoping open data from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) could do.

Kallos represents Manhattan's Upper East Side and his constituents, like most New Yorkers, complain that MTA buses are frequently late (read a previous Fast Companyprofile of Kallos here). But when Kallos forwarded complaints to the MTA, the agency would respond that the problems don't exist and a particularly vocal subset of his constituents must be exaggerating.

It's no secret that New Yorkers don't think too much about pay phones any more. A quick stroll around the city will reveal that many pay phones don't work and many are just empty booths, lacking actual phones. But the pay phones are a vital piece of city infrastructure, especially in disaster situations. With the need to preserve that infrastructure and the opportunity to reimagine the public terminal, NYC's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) was tasked with finding a way to preserve pay phones while making them more useful to people in the 21st century.

To accomplish that, DoITT solicited proposals from companies around the world. After a lengthy process, the city has selected a proposal by a consortium of companies collectively called CityBridge. Over the next four to five years, CityBridge will build out what it is calling the LinkNYC network. Each individual terminal will be called a Link and will offer blazing-fast Wi-Fi, touch-screen interfaces, the ability to quickly make 911 and 311 calls, and free charging stations for mobile devices.

"The first payphone was installed in Chicago in 1898 and hasn't changed much since," says New York City Council Member Ben Kallos. "This will revolutionize the structure's design and bring us one step closer to universal broadband in public areas."

Councilmember Ben Kallos, who represents Manhattan's Upper East Side and has a background in software development, says that the first priority is “making sure that phone booths remain,” rather than uprooting them entirely as might be tempting in an era of ubiquitous cell phones.

During Hurricane Sandy, which devastated low-lying coastal areas of New York City, payphones became a lifeline for residents in need of help. With cell phone networks out of commission, payphones, with their old-fashioned copper wire infrastructure, were often the only way residents in distress could call for help or communicate with loved ones.

“We have these phone booths that have become under-utilized,” says Kallos. “If you walk around my district, you'll see that many of these booths don't even have phones in them. And when you're talking about a brave new world with Sandy, we need to know that everyone has copper to the home and copper to the street corner.”