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City technology officials encouraged attendees of the civic technology conference Personal Democracy Forum last week to imagine opportunities for interactive government engagement in 2025 through the "ubiquitous connectivity" that is the goal of the de Blasio administration.

"This is more of a visioning exercise than a planning exercise," said city chief technology officer Minerva Tantoco, as she described how wi-fi in all the New York City Housing Authority buildings would allow residents to get text messages about repair, safety and community events.

She took part in a session with Jeff Merritt, director of innovation at the Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation, and chief digital officer Jessica Singleton, whom Mayor Bill de Blasio officially promoted to the position Friday.

The officials urged participants to imagine the impact of connectivity on their daily life at home, at work, in communities and in public places, and how it would affect diverse members of the population, such as a public school student, a single mother, a tourist or a young professional, as an illustrator worked to visualize the suggestions on a whiteboard.

Many of the suggestions revolved around the possibility of instantaneous alerts, utilizing sensors at garbage cans and application programming interfaces to the new LinkNYC payphone wi-fi units that could notify residents about community board meetings, snow days, alternate-side street parking and subway delays.

One participant complained that "New York City government doesn't talk to itself," with a lack of communication between agencies such as the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, agencies overseeing a street protest, the buildings department and the street traffic regulators.

When another participant suggested the possibility of receiving notifications about visits by city inspectors, Singleton said that this idea had been incorporated in new applications for NYCHA that would let residents view and cancel work requests. Tantoco praised the idea of "organizing government services around the communities, as opposed to figuring out which agency to go to."

Other parts of the conversation touched on providing job training and online job opportunities to people in poverty and providing new connections between the city and businesses.

"If the Department of Education is looking for businesses to host interns..., it's very hard to reach the businesses," one of the participants who had been involved in such efforts said, proposing "having a platform where you can make that easier to facilitate that matchmaking."

On the theme of communities, participants discussed the role of libraries as a community hub and forming closer relationships to neighbors.

Other subjects of discussion included making it easier for community boards to get a sense of community opinions, finding other ways for citizens to report back to government, such as how the Taxis and Limousine Commission allows riders to submit a photo of a driver running a red light, creating a universal transit fare ticket for different forms of public transit, incorporating Notify NYC and M.T.A. notification alerts in to the data portal, providing routing suggestions during disasters and a rewards system for police officers who enter the best collision data.

A New York Public Library employee proposed making it easy for members of the public to book public spaces, as another member of the public echoed the emergence of "libraries as co-working spaces."

During an earlier panel, the city's chief analytics officer Amen Ra Mashariki said one of the biggest challenges he faces in his work is ensuring access to data beyond just making it available on a portal.

"It's really not open data unless people have access to it, and they know it's there and they know how to use it, to raise their quality of life," he said.

That awareness was missing in many communities, he said, including a group of academics he recently met "who had no idea this [open data portal] existed."

But he also talked about the importance of finding a balance between recognizing that existing government structures are often necessary to help prevent bad policy, while still finding ways for the "agile" approach and the "hackers' mindset to influence government.

"We can't create Estonia on the fly," he said, referring to the country that is known for its embrace of e-government.

State officials were not represented at this year's conference.

On Thursday, Susan Crawford, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a member of the de Blasio administration's Broadband Advisory Task Force, wrote a piece on Medium that took a somewhat skeptical view if Governor Andrew Cuomo's broadband policy, which involves a $500 million investment to be matched by Internet providers, to realize his goal of providing access to high-speed Internet access to all New Yorkers by 2018.

While Crawford writes that the plan has lots of "potential" and highlights its "scale and ambition," she expresses some worry that the state may not have the "aggressive leadership" necessary to ensure that the Internet markets are affordable and the new service available to consumers is affordable.

"If the state can lower barriers to the rights-of-way and other state assets that make networks cost-effective (as Connecticut has), and hold the [Regional Councils'] feet to the fire until they come up with open fiber initiatives that will drive down the prices consumers and businesses pay, then the $500 million will have been well spent," she wrote.

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Autor(en)/Author(s): Miranda Neubauer

Quelle/Source: Capital New York, 08.06.2015

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