TechPresident

But beyond the legislation to make future editions of the City Records, which goes into effect in one year, the city has also reached out to a group of civic technology and advocacy organizations to undertake an effort over the next year to make around 4,000 previous editions of the City Record from 1998 to the present, currently in PDF format, accessible in a comparable way.

Coordinating that effort are Noel Hidalgo and Chris Whong, executive director and co-captain, respectively, of New York City's Code for America brigade BetaNYC, which has pushed for the legislation along with sponsor City Council member Ben Kallos, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, City Council member James Vacca and City Council member Brad Lander.

During the meeting Friday, she said she was surprised at how just staffers' participation "demystified [Wikipedia] for them" and illustrated how "it was simple and not scary." That kind of conversation should happen in every congressional office, she said, to move beyond using Wikipedia as a reference tool, spread awareness of concepts such as open source and civic technology, and also help staffers access institutional knowledge better. "It's not shared in a way that's useful," she said, adding that the role of a wiki-like platform could be " helping Congress access its own support system more effectively," sharing knowledge between district offices, communications offices, policy offices and committees, which could draw on stack-exchange like platform to get real-time input during hearings. In many ways, her vision echoes local efforts, such as open and participatory government pushes by New York City Council member Ben Kallos.

The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications plans to publish more than double the amount of datasets this year than it published to the portal last year, new Commissioner Anne Roest wrote last week in an annual report mandated by the city's open data law, with 135 datasets scheduled to be released this year, and almost 100 more to come in 2015.

But what what matters more to New York City open data advocates than the absolute number of the datasets is their quality and values: creating a transparent process of releasing the data, making the data machine-readable and prioritizing release of data sets in high demand. As preparations are underway for City Council hearings on the law, New York City's open data progress and challenges are both a model and reflective of open data efforts across the country.

"I think New York City is doing an amazing job with Open Data. I think that the city is not taking nearly enough credit for a lot of the datasets involved with the Mayor's Management report," said City Council member Ben Kallos, chair of the Government Operations Committee, referring to datasets related to a mandated annual public report card of city services. "It may appear like it's only one dataset here and there but the underlying data is so rich and contains so many hundreds of other datasets that the administration is releasing so much more information than anyone expected by this point."

Currently, it is not possible for New Yorkers to easily sign up to track updates on City Council meetings and legislative activities. But in fact, there could be an easy fix for the problem that could help transform how members of the public engage with their government. That is what emerged from a #PDF14 workshop that illustrated how the realization of visions for open government in New York often comes down to wonky nuts and bolts issues related to government web platforms, procurement and access to open data.

City Council member Ben Kallos, chair of the Government Operations Committee, hosted the session together with Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer in the spirit of "bringing government to the people." Also in the name of transparency, he arranged for a recording of the session.

New York City councilor Ben Kallos has introduced the Free and Open Source Software Act that would require the city to use open source software before purchasing proprietary software.

We have more PDF14 videos for you: Ilyse Hogue on the Internet and stigma in "Virtual Jiu-Jitsu: Whose Stigma is it Now?" Andrew Rasiej and Brad Smith in a Q&A about "the civics of tech." Ben Kallos at the NYC OpenGov Workshop.

Last weekend, around one hundred members of New York City's civic hacker community came together to help develop tools that would be useful for City Council and local Community Board members as part of Code Across NYC, organized by Code for America brigade betaNYC. As part of the event, open government advocates Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and City Council member Ben Kallos discussed their transparency advocacy. With input from five Community Board members and New York City officials, the weekend program resulted in the creation of 20 projects, of which 12 were submitted for five awards.

Newly-elected New York City Council member Ben Kallos' constituent event Thursday afternoon was unusual in several respects: there were some connectivity problems, and the issues discussed ranged from a proposed municipal ID system and the Comcast/Time Warner merger to proprietary software used by the City Council and data analytics.

Kallos hosted a Google Hangout with about ten participants to announce his online constituent services, including SeeClickFix, and to discuss issues of concern to his constituents and the New York City technology community. For the SeeClickFix effort, he is building on an established program run by the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, which has been using the platform on the island, part of his district along with the Upper East Side, since 2010.

While there was a lot of hype about a report that the NYPD is testing Google Glass, in the short-term a policy-shift toward more accessible NYPD data has the potential to be more consequential for New Yorkers at large.

BetaNYC, New York City's Code for America brigade, is embracing the prospect of change under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio by seizing on his agenda priority to prevent pedestrian fatalities to renew its call for the city and the NYPD to release traffic data in a more usable format.