Earlier in the afternoon, Councilman Ben Kallos will participate in a panel on "Designing the Digital Legislature" along with Seamus Kraft, executive director of the OpenGov Foundation, a co-creator of the Free Law Founders with Kallos, and David Moore, executive director of the Participatory Politics Foundation.
Chin was not alone. Council members Corey Johnson, Dan Garodnick, Ben Kallos, Jumaane Williams, Helen Rosenthal and Mark Levine also called on the R.G.B. to reduce rents on stabilized apartments.
James, along with Council members Daniel Dromm, Andy King, Brad Lander and Ben Kallos and child hunger advocates, held a press conference outside the Department of Education headquarters on Wednesday during which they called on de Blasio to include free lunch for all city schoolchildren in the final budget.
On a later panel, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Councilman Ben Kallos discussed how technology could help bridge the gap between the government and the public. With the establishment of laws she spearheaded, including open data and webcasting legislation, "now the challenge is making it work," Brewer said, to ensure that agencies fulfill the mandate, data is available in real-time and is up-to-date, as agencies also still face logistical and bandwidth hurdles when seeking to webcast meetings.
Kallos said Council legislation will be available through an open application programming interface beginning in July. Council legislation, meeting and member datawas already recently added to the open data portal. While those datasets had a deadline of Jan. 1, Council land use items are currently only scheduled to come on the portal in December 2018. Kallos emphasized the need for a partnership between government and the private sector and technology developers to ensure that the right of kind of data is made available in the right format.
Other members presented specific concerns: Jumaane Williams was troubled by funding levels for the NYPD, Jimmy van Bramer complained of insufficient money allocated for libraries—which Fuleihan indicated would be altered in the revised capital budget—and Ben Kallos questioned the growth and overall cost of the city's debt.
Kallos positively cited the elimination of voter cards, listing voters' ages in poll books, the board's adoption of City Time, its subscription to the Social Security Death Master File Index, implementation of electronic detection of write-ins and the purchase of high-speed printers to print various types of ballots as needed.
Councilman Ben Kallos is expected to introduce legislation today that would allow residents to get information on the locations of vehicles towed due to temporary parking restrictions by accessing the Department of Transportation's website or calling 311.
Currently, according to Kallos, that is only possible for vehicles taken to impound lots for regular parking violations. When vehicles are moved to a surrounding block due to construction without the owners' knowledge, the police may have no record of it, Kallos said, and owners are told to search surrounding blocks or contact construction crews who may have left.
City Council members hope to improve public engagement with the legislative process through tech, as civic technologists aim to expand and step up their efforts.
Councilman Ben Kallos, chair of the Governmental Operations Committee, said he planned to focus on implementation of the laws requiring online publication of the city's laws and of the City Council technology plan that was part of rules reforms passed last year.
"We've already gotten so much more accomplished in the first year than anyone may have ever expected and I think a lot of the focus in 2015 will be around implementation, beta-testing and learning from our first roll-outs and implementations," Kallos said.
In connection with those efforts, Kallos suggested that the Council could look toward the model of the State Senate's web platform, new tools for engaging with constituents and public-private partnerships incorporating other cities and civic technology groups.
The City Council on Wednesday confirmed Councilman Ben Kallos as its appointee to the Commission on Public Information and Communication, one day before Public Advocate Letitia James plans to hold a hearing on the commission.
Though often invoked by city open government advocates, the commission, which aims to improve access to city information and data, has held only infrequent meetings and has had little influence in recent years.
In remarks before the rules committee on Wednesday morning, Kallos said that the "great commission" was one reason he had wanted to become chair of the Governmental Operations committee, which has oversight over COPIC.
"It has been slightly dysfunctional and hasn't been meeting," he said. "We have a great leader in our public advocate, Tish James, and I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to ... [work] with our public advocate to get the word out on all the information and all the great things this government does."
City Councilman Ben Kallos introduced legislation today that would require the creation of a universal smartphone app for hailing cabs in New York.
The measure is backed by taxi owners and would, in theory, neutralize the threat of e-hail companies like Uber while making it easier to connect with yellow or green borough cabs by app, rather than using the traditional street hail. It follows a similar effort in Chicago,where the city is planning to develop one or several apps that would allow riders to go to one place to hail a cab. Officials in Washington, D.C., are undertaking a similar effort.
“The gist of the bill is it’s designed to allow people to hail yellow and green cabs, where as right now it’s not easy to do that,” Sarah Anders, a spokeswoman for Kallos, said.
