How open is it? The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it’s always under attack.
Increasingly, the City of New York has embraced several open methodologies that contribute to good internet health. This has included a push towards ensuring that technologies are interoperable and allow for public scrutiny and collective action. One of the most notable examples is the City’s Open Data efforts. In March of 2012, the City Council passed the Open Data Law, mandating that City agencies and departments make City data freely available.
This effort, in collaboration with the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT), is managed by the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA), led by the City’s Chief Analytics Officer Kelly Jin. MODA builds programs with a mission of Open Data for All, meaning that the City’s Open Data programs are designed to benefit every kind of New Yorker. Each spring, MODA also hosts Open Data Week, a series of events that celebrate NYC’s Open Data Law and raise awareness about NYC Open Data. Among MODA’s 2018 highlights: 200+ civic engagement commitments made by more than 60 agencies, and 1.2 million visitors to NYC Open Data, the city's data hub.
NYCx Co-Labs are neighborhood-based partnerships that combine technology piloting and education in high-need, high-opportunity neighborhoods. Originally known as The Neighborhood Innovation Labs, and announced by the White House as part of the Obama administration’s “Smart Cities Initiative” in 2015, NYCx Co-Labs is a partnership between The Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and NYC Economic Development Corporation. The program brings together a set of partners — from government, local non-profit organizations, technology companies — through various events, workshops, and community spaces to accelerate research and development of new technologies that can improve city life. In 2017, in partnership with four City agencies, NYCx launched the first two Co-Lab Challenges in Brownsville, Brooklyn: Safe and Thriving Nighttime Corridors and Zero Waste in Public Spaces. Wherever a Co-Lab is set up, a group of community-based organizations are assembled to guide local programming. In this way, NYCx Co-labs promotes inclusive community-driven innovation by empowering community members to co-research, co-design, and co-implement solutions to local challenges, democratizing and opening innovation.
To support and build upon the City’s open data programming, the nonprofit group BetaNYC has become a prominent player, with a mission to improve lives in NYC through civic design, technology, and data. To date, BetaNYC has supported countless open data events and projects, linking city government and the community. Most recently, the organization launched the NYC Civic Innovation Lab and Fellowship, a program that partners Civic Tech fellows with Community Boards to improve their civic engagement practices using technology.
There are a number of additional programs that are growing in the City of New York that are built on open principles. In 2015, the Mayor’s Office of the CTO released the first ever IoT guidelines for cities deploying new smart city technologies. These guidelines focus on privacy, transparency, data management, infrastructure, security, operations, and sustainability. Importantly, these guidelines are part of a broader goal to ensure that all new IoT technologies are interoperable and that cities and vendors are transparent in their deployment and use. Making “smart” cities more open and transparent is the first step to making them more ethical, too.
Since 2016, NYC’s technology community has been served by Tech:NYC, a nonprofit that connects startups and increases their ability to understand and contribute to policy conversations that affect the industry. Tech:NYC regularly holds events and shares information that give insights into how technology policy is developed in NYC.
In 2017, the Mayor’s Office of the CTO started the NYCx, a program that invites entrepreneurs technologists, and tech professionals to participate in open competitions. Through NYCx, the City works with agencies and communities to identify important challenges, and then packages these as opportunities for the tech community to solve. To date, NYCx has launched five challenges, ranging from improving cybersecurity capacity for NYC small businesses to bringing new broadband solutions to disconnected geographies.
NYC Open Records is a project out of the Department of Records and Information Services and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Built upon source code from a similar project from Oakland, California, Open Records offers a quick and easy way for the public to submit Freedom of Information requests (FOIL) to an agency, and to see the status of requests.
Finally, NYC Planning Labs is a new division out of the NYC Department of City Planning that embraces open technology, agile development, and user-centered design to built impactful products with NYC’s Urban Planners. NYC Planning Labs is built upon four main principles: open by default; ship early, ship often; build with, not for; and document and disseminate. To date, they have built 10 major applications maintained with dozens of open source repositories at github.com/nycplanning.
