"In God We Trust," tweeted New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg this month. "Everyone else, bring data."

Bloomberg, the billionaire founder of Bloomberg L.P., is now in his third term as mayor of the Big Apple. During his tenure, New York City has embraced a more data-driven approach to governing, even when the results of that data-driven transparency show a slump in city services.

This should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the mission statement of his financial data company:

Bloomberg started out with one core belief: that bringing transparency to capital markets through access to information could increase capital flows, produce economic growth and jobs, and significantly reduce the cost of doing business.

To reshape that mission statement for New York City, one might reasonably suggest that Bloomberg's data-driven approach to government is founded upon that belief that bringing transparency to government through access to information could increase capital flows, produce economic growth and jobs, and significantly reduce the cost of the business of government.

As Gov 2.0 goes local, New York City has become the epicenter for many experiments in governance, from citizensourcing smarter government to participatory budgeting to embracing a broader future as a data platform.

One of the most prominent New Yorkers supporting architecting a city as a platform is the city's first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne.

Sterne gave a keynote speech at this year's Strata NY conference that explained how data-driven innovation informs New York's aim to be the nation's premier digital city.

"I'm especially excited to be speaking with you because as a city, we need your help," said Sterne to the assembled Strata attendees. "As the data practitioners and data scientists who are at the forefront of this revolution, all of our efforts are for naught if you are not part of them and not helping us to expand them and helping to really take advantage of all of the resources that the city of New York is trying put at your disposal."

Video of Sterne's talk is embedded below.

New York City's digital strategy is focused on access to technology, open government, engagement and industry. "Industry is important because we need to make sure the private sector has all the supports it needs to grow and thrive and help to create these solutions that will help the government to ultimately better serve the public," said Sterne. "Open government is important because if our data and our internal structure and priorities aren't completely open, we're not going to be able to enable increased [open] services, that kind of [open] exchange of information, etc. Engagement is crucial because we need to be constantly gathering feedback from the public, informing and serving. And access is the foundation because everyone needs access to these technologies."

Big data in the Big Apple

What does data-driven innovation look like in New York City? Sterne focused on how data "evolves government," asserting that it leads to a more efficient allocation of resources, a more effective execution, and a better response to the real-time needs of citizens. Although she allowed that, "as everyone knows, data can be manipulated."

Sterne highlighted several data-driven initiatives across the city, including the Metropolitan Transit Authority's Bus Time Initiative. "Initially, it was scoped out to hundreds of millions of dollars. The MTA ended up working with a local open-source development shop, [which] did it for a fraction of that, below a million dollars, and now you can get real-time updates on your phone based on where the buses are located using very low-cost technologies."

New York City is also using data internally, explained Sterne — like applying predictive analytics to building code violations and housing data to try to understand where potential fire risks might exist. If that sounds familiar to Radar readers, it should: Chicago is also looking to use data, developers and citizens to become a smarter city. "This is as much about citizens talking to the infrastructure of the city as infrastructure talking to itself," said Chicago CTO John Tolva in an interview last March. "It's where urban informatics and smarter cities cross over to Gov 2.0."

Web 2.0 Summit, being held October 17-19 in San Francisco, will examine "The Data Frame" — focusing on the impact of data in today's networked economy.

Save $300 on registration with the code RADAR

New York City, however, has a vastly greater "digital reach" than Chicago. It's bigger than many corporations and states, in fact, connecting to more than four million people through NYC.gov and social media channels that have expanded to include Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube and Foursquare. Sterne envisions the city's 200-plus social media platforms as a kind of "digital switchboard," where citizens ask questions and government workers direct them to the appropriate resources, much in the same way that California connects citizens to e-services with social media.

The web as the 21st century public square

"What we're really seeing that's interesting about all these things is that they're happening in public, so people are informing one another," said Sterne. "They're engaging one another, and it's not so much the city telling you what to do but creating a forum for that conversation to take place." If you visit NYC's custom bitly URL shortener, on.nyc.gov, you can see what content is popular within that community.

Back in May, when NYC's digital roadmap was released, Anil Dash highlighted something important: the roadmap captured New York City government thinking about the web as a public space. This has profound implications about how it should be regulated, treated or described. "The single biggest lesson I got from the
65-page, 11.8mb PDF is a simple one," Dash, a native New Yorker, blogger and entrepreneur, wrote. "The greatest city in the world can take shared public spaces online as seriously as it takes its public spaces in the physical world."

City as a platform

Sterne's description of a "city as a platform" is one of the purest articulations of Tim O'Reilly's "government as a platform" vision that I've heard any public servant articulate this year.

"The thing that's really exciting to me, better than internal data, of course, is open data," Sterne said during her Strata Conference talk. "This, I think, is where we really start to reach the potential of New York City becoming a platform like some of the bigger commercial platforms and open data platforms. How can New York City, with the enormous amount of data and resources we have, think of itself the same way Facebook has an API ecosystem or Twitter does? This can enable us to produce a more user-centric experience of government. It democratizes the exchange of information and services. If someone wants to do a better job than we are in communicating something, it's all out there. It empowers citizens to collaboratively create solutions. It's not just the consumption but the co-production of government services and democracy."

Sterne highlighted the most important open data initiative that the city has pursued to date, the NYC DataMine. Soon, she said, they will be introducing "NYC Platform," which she described as "the city's API." All of their work opening the data, however, "doesn't matter if we're not evangelizing it and making sure people are using it."

NYC has used an app competition to draw more attention to its open data. As I've written elsewhere, by tying specific citizen needs to development, NYC Bigs Apps 3.0 is part of the next-generation of government apps competitions that incorporate sustainability, community, and civic value.

"We've had about 150 apps developed," said Sterne. "There are apps that would be a significant cost to the city. Instead, they're at basically no cost because the prize money is all donated. We provide 350 datasets. Until now, they were not API-enabled. They were not dynamic, but we're going to be doing that because that's the overwhelming response that we're receiving from everyone."

That feedback is widespread in the open government data community, where studies show that developers prefer to explore and interact with data online, as opposed to downloading datasets. When it comes to developers working with public data, dynamic access can open up entire new horizons for potential applications, as the release of real-time transit data has demonstrated.

Sterne shared some useful examples of apps that have been created using NYC open government data, including Roadify, which allows you to find parking spots or transit information, and Don't Eat At, a Foursquare app that sends users a text message when they check into a NYC restaurant that is at risk of being closed for health code violations.

Sterne's message to data scientists was generally quite well received at Strata. "Pleased to see @RachelSterne's keynote today," tweeted Alistair Coote, a NYC Web developer at RecordSetter. "If done right, open govt will be far more important than anything announced at #f8 today," he observed, referring to Facebook's new look.

Why open government data matters to New Yorkers

The experience in NYC during Hurricane Irene "once again proved the utility and importance of open data and the NYC DataMine, as several organizations used OEM's Hurricane Evacuation Zone geographic data to build maps that served and informed the public," Sterne told me via email. "This data has been public for over a year. Parties developing tools built on city platforms included WNYC, NYTimes, Google, Mobile Commons and Crisis Commons. NYC Digital was also in regular contact with these parties to alert them of information changes."

The key insight coming out of that August weekend, with respect to the city acting as a platform during unprecedented demands for information, was that th[…]

Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems.

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

How DataSF.org, which publishes dozens of official data sets, is starting to transform life and politics in San Francisco

Make or explore Freedom of Information requests

The European Commission's Digital Competitiveness report published today shows that Europe's digital sector has made strong progress since 2005: 56% of Europeans now regularly use the internet, 80% of them via a high-speed connection (compared to only one third in 2004), making Europe the world leader in broadband internet. Europe is the world's first truly mobile continent with more mobile subscribers than citizens (a take up rate of 119%). Europe can advance even further as a generation of "digitally savvy" young Europeans becomes a strong market driver for growth and innovation. Building on the potential of the digital economy is essential for Europe's sustainable recovery from the economic crisis. Today the Commission has asked the public what future strategy the EU should adopt to make the digital economy run at full speed.

Britain has “sleepwalked into a surveillance society”, it was claimed last night after figures disclosed that public bodies had obtained access to private telephone and e-mail records about 1,400 times a day. Council, police and other organisations made more than half a million requests for confidential communications data last year. The statistics constitute a 44 per cent rise in requests over the past two years.

One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.

So presently the City of Vancouver only shares its garbage schedule (which it divides into north and south) as a PDF file. This is a pity as it means that no one can build any apps around it. Imagine a website or Iphone app that mashed up google maps with a constantly up to date city garbage pick up schedule. With such a application one could: (..)

Er staan al 1676 foto's in het whitehouse account op Flickr:

A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization's workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.

This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

Voor het eerst zie ik nu de nieuwe site van president Obama, Recovery.gov. Een website waar hij op een volkomen transparante manier inzichtelijk maakt hoe het belastinggeld van het Amerikaanse volk aangewend gaat worden om de crisis te bezweren. “In stead of politicians doling out money behind closed doors.“. Groter kan het verschil met premier Balkenende niet zijn.

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our television president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.

As part of the new brand identity of the Dutch government Peter Verheul designed a custom typeface for all forms of visual communications.

The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force ISPs to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.

Door de blogs op www.ambtenaar20.nl, de discussies die daaruit volgden en de vele ontmoetingen die ik daarna heb gehad, ben ik er bewust van geworden dat rondom Open Overheid er flink wat initiatieven zijn. Ook blijkt dat het onderwerp soms verwarring oproept. Want wat is de relatie met begrippen als open source of open standaarden? En gaat het niet gewoon om openbaarheid? En waarom gaat het alleen over de overheid? Tijd voor een toelichting op het begrip Open Overheid.

GovTrack.us is a tool for you to keep tabs on the U.S. Congress. Use our feeds or research pending and past legislation. GovTrack is a community & open source project.

Open-source knowledge base speeds discovery, research and networking with more than 110 best practice documents and a secure directory of participating government officials from over 450 cities, counties and US states.

The media attributed the quote "invented the Internet" to Al Gore. That was completely incorrect, and this page lists the history of this historical misattribution (or even foul political play).

"Every week, a dozen or so times, your MP votes on changes to British law. This is their definitive exercise of power on your behalf. The Public Whip lets you see all their votes so you can hold them to account"