Gateway to Gov - Research and Discussion Blog

I’m pleased to announce that Gateway has awarded a Google Earth Pro grant. This software grant will help us to expand and enhance the GIS planning we’ve been doing for the NYCCF project. This is our second Google grant, the first being a scholarship to attend the Personal Democracy Forum that we received in 2007. Many thanks to Google for their continued support!

NYC Primary Election - Tuesday, September 15th 6am - 9pm

Voter guide:
http://www.nyccfb.info/public/voter-guide/primary_2009

To look up your candidates for the general election:
http://pvoter.org (this website will soon be renamed and moved to whoismygov.org. It’s a TOPP project that was used for http://tacandidatesurvey.org)

To locate your polling site:
http://gis.nyc.gov/vote/ps/index.htm

To look up your voter registration info:
https://voterlookup.elections.state.ny.us/

You can also call the board of elections at 1-866-VOTE-NYC

(via Philip Ashlock, TOPP - http://ideas.topplabs.org/wiki/2009_NYC_Primary_Election )

Today, July 13th 2009, is the first day of the NYC Department of Buildings new online development challenge policy -

“The Department has formalized a new 45-day formal development challenge process.  This gives the public a greater voice in the development process and provides developers further clarity about when and how a project can move forward. This Development Challenge process applies to zoning approvals on all existing building.”

Changes to the DOB policy include lengthening the public comment period from 30 to 45 days limiting public comment to 45 days (see update below) and enabling constituents to search for proposed developments using an online search mechanism.

While we applaud this policy improvement we also see room for more progress. In particular, it seems challenges submitted to the department will exist in a black box until the department has made its decision.

“Zoning-related challenges that are part of the new process will be posted on the Department’s website after the Department’s review and decision. “

We feel its important that public comments be made visible to all while the challenge period is still open - as is standard in most agency RFC processes - enabling both the developer of the proposed buildings and public-at-large to submit followup comments supporting or refuting a given statement.

Secondly, it seems that searches are onetime only with no mechanism to “Notify when new developments are proposed” or similar style functionality. Given that constituents are unlikely to manually check and re-check their neighborhood, adding a subscription model would be very helpful.

Finally, it would be ideal if the department provided an XML feed or API for querying the underlying database. This would enable third party organizations to develop additional functionality on top of this data - for instance, what if I’m only concerned with developments on a single block? Rather than asking the city to develop functionality for each and every use case (a single entity, the city, serving a broad range of constituents) we feel the city should open up the ability for third-party web developers to add build any/all new functionality (search by distance from line? search by distance from schools? search by distance from water?) or analytical analysis approaches (compare population density to zoning change request rates? compare income levels to zoning approvals?) as they see fit.

Read the press release, visual description of changes (pdf) and skim the FAQ (pdf).

—

Update: As we just learned from the Gotham Gazette’s writeup, public comment hadn’t been limited to 30 days as we’d come to believe when reading the Department’s press release - but had been open for an indefinite period of time prior to this policy change. We do not believe that placing new limits public discourse is in the public interest and hope to see this aspect of the new policy revised ASAP.

NYC Council’s Technology in Government Committee held a public hearing to discuss Int. 991-2009, a bill sponsored by Gale Brewer  mandating that NYC government release all city data online. Full video coverage shows that the administration is less than supportive of this legislation.

As Joly MacFie put it:

“… Bloomberg’s announcement upstages a much wider proposal by Gale Brewer to make as much NYC government data as possible available, rather than just 82 selected sets.”

In what appears to be a similar vein, though this hasn’t been officially confirmed, the NYCEDC has released a NYC Data RFEI -

“The New York City Economic Development Corporation (“NYCEDC”), on behalf of New York City (“City”), seeks expressions of interest from individuals and organizations with experience developing software applications. Respondents to this RFEI are requested to submit written descriptions of City-related data they would like to see made public. These descriptions should provide as much detail as possible about the type and level of data desired. In addition, respondents are requested to describe how they envision the data being used in software applications that provide a useful service to City residents, visitors and government. The information gathered from this RFEI will be used to help the City decide how to prioritize the release of City data to the public in a format easily utilized by application developers. City data will be released or reformatted in connection with a related software application competition where contestants will develop applications that make it easier to live, work and play in New York City.”

Register for the RFEI on the NYCEDC’s website or download the RFEI directly.

On Monday morning Mayor Bloomberg made a Skype appearance at #PDF09, announcing that NYC would be holding a “Big Apps Competition” in the spirit of DC’s Apps for Democracy. The New York Future Initiative did a nice piece on this, as did the NYTimes City Room blog.

Garnering less publicity, the NYCEDC has issued an RFP for an individual or organization to run this contest. Interest? Register on the NYCEDC’s website or download the RFP directly.

The last couple of weeks have been very busy (re: NYC Community Fiber) but I’ve managed to set a few hours aside to attend Day 1 of Participation Camp 2009, an unconference being at NYU’s ITP. True to its participatory namesake, the two main organizers, Matt Cooperrider and Suresh Fernando, have done a great job putting together a hybrid online/offline format.

Two video streams provided by Livestream.com (formerly known as Mogulus) enable remote participants to follow roughly have of the sessions and a combination of Skype and DimDim have been used to pipe-in remote presenters. Having watched the streams for some amount of time, the audio and video quality has been consistently good - cudos to the technical crew!

Unfortunately though, NYC Councilmember Gale Brewer’s session on opening government data, Introduction No. 991-2009, wasn’t streamed live. It was one of the largest sessions of the day, filling ITP’s largest conference room to capacity and beyond - people were standing in the hall!  True to barcamp-style, Gale gave an overview of the proposed legislation then turned the session over to group discussion in a Q&A-style format.

Several notable individuals participated in the discussion, including but certainly not limited to, Andrew Hoppin (CIO, NYS Senate), Noel Hidalgo (Director of Technology, NYS Senate, ), Steven Clift (Founder, e-democracy.org), Silona Bonewald (Founder, Legal of Technical Voters), and Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org).

More to follow as Day 2 of Participation Camp 2009 unfolds, followed by Personal Democracy Forum 2009 on Monday and Tuesday.

A lively discussion of eDemocracy tools, techniques and approaches is underway at the George Washington University, The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) & The Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM).

Follow remotely using  twitter hashtag #eDemCamp and the wiki, http://www.eDemocracyCamp.org

Find your polling location and vote!
http://maps.google.com/vote

Google just announced a new tool for finding polling locations, absentee ballots and the various deadlines along the way.

“We developed the site in the hope that it will increase voter participation. We were helped by a number of partners, including many state and local election officials, the League of Women Voters, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and others involved in the Voting Information Project.”

http://maps.google.com/vote

via TechPresident

Starting a non-profit is as hard, if not harder, than starting a for-profit — and for all the financial risk and hard work invested starting a not-for-profit public service organization, very little (if any) chance of a financial return, no less any form of remuneration for the years of effort invested. If I’d only known how difficult it would be to get things started… but I suppose hindsight is 20/20.
Approximately 28 months in now, I know I’ve got a pretty clear picture of the sector - I’ve read about, seen or used a majority of the different e-democracy/online advocacy projects that a variety of different organizations, universities, governments and individuals have undertaken over the past ten years and have had first hand exposure to nearly every US-based effort undertaken in the past three years. I’ve read hundreds if not thousands of pages of papers, reports, proposals, studies and various other publications… and attended dozens of conferences, meetings, workshops, un-conferences, camps and every other variation of gathering one can imagine, meeting literally hundreds of people along the way, many dozen of which I can see significant potential for collaboration with, and several I’m actively engaging with, working together, trying to find a way forward -

Thats all well and good -  and while I’ve cross-pollinated many ideas along the way (like a bee to flowers?) I have yet to make any direct, substantiative, developments on the core proposal(s) Gateway has been putting forward …and grow increasingly fatigued at the prospect of writing/refining yet another grant proposal. Fundraising is, apparently, not my forte.

Many potential funders (read: dozens of program managers / foundation execs),  while intrigued enough to spend 60-90-120 minutes on the phone, apparently didn’t hear the secret-passphrase or such… and in the end, our project, while intriguing, was deemed to fall outside their core funding area… or they really wanted to “wait and see”.

Well, risk-adversity and angel/seed investment might not be the best bedfellows — and quite frankly, I sometimes I wonder if everyone wouldn’t have benefited more if I’d played the for-profit tech-startup-lottery (making the next eBay or such) potentially putting myself in the position to *be* the funder for projects like ours, as opposed to wasting countless hours asking other people to fund what I could have funded myself if I hadn’t put countless hours into asking other people for funding! Argh. Anyhow, sorry about that - needed to get some steam off my chest.

Well, this blog post is starting to get quite lengthy… thanks for reading and I’ll be back with more *positive* blog posts soon. Best to all -