The Independent View: NYC Government and Technology for 2015

I have been in the Information Technology industry for 50 years and Politics for 12. So combining these two interests was the reason for this post.

I have worked on E-Government projects for the United Nations and in Europe, so now living in New York City, I decided to review what is the current level of government and technology.

It took months, but Mayor de Blasio finally filled out the leadership of his tech team. He named Anne Roest as the Commissioner for the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), followed by the appointment of Minerva Tantoco as the city's first Chief Technology Officer, and Dr. Amen Ra Mashariki as the city's Chief Analytics Officer.

The team has been busy with Roest focusing on fixing the new emergency 911 system during her first few months in office. Then it was all hands on deck for the LinkNYC announcement and push to get the contract approved.

Few specifics have emerged from the tech team as to what the administration will be rolling out in 2015, but it appears much, if not all, will come back to de Blasio's broader goal of bridging the digital divide.

"The first step is to make sure you support and advance the mayor's overall strategy for the city and then the trick is to connect the dots and define a set of principles that can guide those technology decisions that support that strategy," Minerva Tantoco, the city's Chief Technology Officer, said in a recent interview.

Civic Tech
One of the areas de Blasio has room to make his mark is the civic tech space. Bloomberg created the BigApps competition which encourages civic hackers and tech entrepreneurs to use city data to make apps. Despite one of the most robust non-governmental civic tech communities in the country, BigApps is about as far as the data-friendly former mayor got with the civic tech community.

Mayors from cities across the country like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are beginning to team up with their respective civic tech communities to help solve problems. While de Blasio hasn't quite opened up City Hall for a hackathon yet, he has paired up with civic hackers to put the City Record archives online after signing a bill into law that requires it. The project could be a hint of more to come.

Tantoco said she is "still in the listening phase" with the civic tech community but noted she is eager to work together. "I welcome ideas to collaborate with others and I have a strong commitment to make that a huge part of what we do in New York City," Tantoco said.

Collaboration may end up being easier after the first of the year. Rasiej and his business partner Micah Sifry will open Civic Hall, an 18,500 square foot space in the Flatiron District. Civic Hall will offer a collaborative workspace for those in the tech industry and could be the bridge between government and tech the city has been missing.

Contract Procurement
In the coming years the City will need to purchase new equipment and software to update its aging technology. The City has not had the best track record in recent years with technology contract procurement, with the CityTime scandal being the highest profile of a string of projects that went over budget and/or over time.

New York City has not been the only one grappling with tech contract procurement, the slow pace of which typically doesn't keep up with the pace of technology. The biggest question is how cities can balance protecting their financial interests with ensuring the best product is purchased and delivered.

"It is a hairy, knotty problem," Tantoco said. "As new technology comes online, the way you buy them and select them becomes way more important," she added. "As technology becomes a huge part of our daily lives and how citizens interact with their government, these technology decisions and purchases become even more important."

The Department of Investigation recently released recommendations for large tech procurement contracts following the bungling of updating the 911 system. Those recommendations were discussed at a recent City Council hearing and will form a guide as the administration moves forward with contract procurement. City Comptroller Scott Stringer had announced a new directive in April outlining heightened requirements for oversight of city IT contracts.

Open Data
The city's Open Data Portal has been up and running for several years now, but there is still vast room for improvement. Data quality and simply getting more data on the portal have, and will likely always be, huge asks from the tech community.

Tantoco called the Open Data Portal a "key priority" and said in the coming months her team would continue to focus on the ease of use and accessibility of the data.

A Civic App Wish List for 2015

Open Budget
There is no government document more important than the budget. It determines how money is spent which in turn means what services will be provided to city residents and thus what the city's priorities are. While New York City does publish its budget online, the document is in PDF form, rendering it virtually useless for data analysis. For the average New Yorker reading the documents to find out, for example, how much money is in the parks budget, it is nearly impossible.

Earlier this year software company Socrata launched Open Budget, an easy to navigate web platform that allows everyday citizens to see exactly how much expense money is budgeted for every agency in any city that utilizes the application. On the capital side of the budget, which deals with building and infrastructure, there is a nifty map that shows exactly where a capital project is located and how far along in the process the it is.

Boston adopted Open Budget this summer and while the app would only cost New York City $1,000 per month, it has yet to be adopted.

Councilmatic
The New York City Council holds hearing nearly every day and with 51 council members, more than 30 issue committees, and hundreds of pieces of legislation introduced each year, it can be difficult to keep up. The Council maintains a very detailed calendar on its website, but in the age of push notifications, checking a website daily is - or should be - an obsolete practice.

Civic hackers in Philadelphia built Councilmatic, an app that scrapes the data from the city's council website and presents it on its own. Councilmatic allows users to subscribe to see when legislation is updated, easily search, contextualize by seeing relevant information around legislation, and evaluate by seeing the pros and cons of legislation. The info is all sent via email whenever the topics you are following are updated. Information on Councilmatic also appears in Google searches, which is currently not the case with data on the New York City Council's outdated Legistar site.

Councilmatic became a huge hit and the open source software was used to build similar sites in Chicago and Oakland. New York City could grab the free code and get a version going here for a relatively low cost - something that has been recommended to the Council as it has committed to revamping its website. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito indicated that major changes to the Council's website are in the works for 2015, but she indicated that details were still being worked out.

CAPSure
The name would likely have to change if brought to New York City, but the service provided by CAPSure could certainly be beneficial. The City of Chicago requires their police precincts to have beat-based community meetings once per quarter. Since the meetings are not always on the same date, CAPSure sends a user an email when the meetings will take place. The idea behind the app is to allow Chicagoans to be more involved in community policing.

New York City regularly has Precinct Community Council meetings and, just like in Chicago, the dates are not regularly set. An app similar to CAPSure would be a great way to notify the public about important community-building meetings in user-friendly ways.

The code for CAPSure is free, however, the NYPD would need to put the meeting dates somewhere public for the app to pull from. In Chicago the meeting dates are pulled from the City's open data portal. The NYPD, though, does not currently post that information on New York City's parallel site.

Promptly
Imagine going to purchase food using EBT benefits only to have the card denied, not due to lack of funds but because your benefits expired. While New York has made it easier to get re-certified by allowing phone instead of in-person interviews, knowing when to set one up is not always easy.

San Francisco began using Promptly, a first-of-its-kind text messaging program for human services agencies. The app sends text messages to residents letting them know important due dates and termination of services deadlines.

The service could be modified here in New York City to include other benefits that need re-certification.

Open Data City
When New York City's Open Data Portal was first released using the search function was a nightmare. Type in a phrase and the results were often limited and not what you were looking for. The issue took two years to fix.

Despite complaints, the City was at the mercy of Socrata and its proprietary software. Even if the City had hired the most talented developers, they wouldn't have been able to make changes. It's akin to your wanting to change something in Microsoft Word to meet your workflow - even if you can code, you can't do it, the software is proprietary.

Recently, governments at various levels, including the federal government with its data.gov site, have switched to CKAN, which provides open source software. The benefit of open source software is customizability. Open Data City provides the expertise to develop the software without locking you into a contract.

In addition, Open Data City seeds the City data with census, labor, and other publicly-available data to deliver ready-made maps. This makes the data portal more user-friendly for those who would rather look at maps, graphs, and charts than spreadsheets.