On a later panel, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Councilman Ben Kallos discussed how technology could help bridge the gap between the government and the public. With the establishment of laws she spearheaded, including open data and webcasting legislation, "now the challenge is making it work," Brewer said, to ensure that agencies fulfill the mandate, data is available in real-time and is up-to-date, as agencies also still face logistical and bandwidth hurdles when seeking to webcast meetings.
Kallos said Council legislation will be available through an open application programming interface beginning in July. Council legislation, meeting and member datawas already recently added to the open data portal. While those datasets had a deadline of Jan. 1, Council land use items are currently only scheduled to come on the portal in December 2018. Kallos emphasized the need for a partnership between government and the private sector and technology developers to ensure that the right of kind of data is made available in the right format.
The new payphone wi-fi program Link NYC has the potential to be a "platform for citizen engagement," members of the CityBridge consortium developing the project said Monday.
Colin O'Donnell, founding partner of consortium member Control Group, even suggested the units set to replace all city pay phones could one day form the basis for digital voting polling stations. O'Donnell spoke alongside Dave Etherington, chief strategy officer of payphone franchisee Titan and Alphonso Jenkins, deputy commissioner at the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) at an Internet Week panel in Chelsea.
Showing a slide illustrating how members of the public might be able to rank local issues such as education on the unit's display, Etherington said the units could offer a way for citizens to "vote on micro issues."
Even though all the funding for the program is to come from data-driven advertising on the unit's panels, "we don't think of this service as an advertising network," O'Donnell said.
He cited Facebook and Google as tools that are seen first as useful services that the public comes to rely on. Etherington emphasized the wi-fi service would be ad-free and not have any pre-roll advertising as is sometimes the case in airports, while O'Donnell pointed out that once a user is registered for the wi-fi service, that registration would remain valid across units for at least a year afterwards.
Etherington also stressed the speed of the network, saying that the gigabit service would make it possible to download a high-resolution version of the "Hobbit" trilogy within minutes, allowing for the development of new applications, just as cable Internet had been a pre-condition for platforms such as YouTube. Evoking the possibilities for brands to use the advertising service, he called Link NYC "an over the web platform transposed to the physical world."
The focus of the Link NYC project is on improving outdoor connectivity, the CityBridge team members said, with other city initiatives to address indoor connectivity.
On a later panel, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Councilman Ben Kallos discussed how technology could help bridge the gap between the government and the public. With the establishment of laws she spearheaded, including open data and webcasting legislation, "now the challenge is making it work," Brewer said, to ensure that agencies fulfill the mandate, data is available in real-time and is up-to-date, as agencies also still face logistical and bandwidth hurdles when seeking to webcast meetings.
Kallos said Council legislation will be available through an open application programming interface beginning in July. Council legislation, meeting and member datawas already recently added to the open data portal. While those datasets had a deadline of Jan. 1, Council land use items are currently only scheduled to come on the portal in December 2018. Kallos emphasized the need for a partnership between government and the private sector and technology developers to ensure that the right of kind of data is made available in the right format.
Also at Internet Week, Kristen Titus, director of the city's Tech Talent Pipeline, spoke about the city's effort to work with industry to help fill technology jobs and prepare the workforce with the right qualifications through a $10 million private public partnership drawing on city, state, federal and private funding.
On Monday, she announced the launch of a NYC Mobile Dev Corps program focused on providing training for those with no background to become mobile engineers earning $60,000 a year, with six to eight other new training programs in partnership with colleges, companies and other providers to be announced later this year, joining the existing web development fellowship.
Read Full Story from Kallos for Council Campaign Updates http://kallosforcouncil.com/press-clip/capital-new-york-payphone-wi-fi-program-seen-citizen-engagement-platform-miranda-neubauer
This article by Feed originally appeared on kallosforcouncil.com on May 23, 2015 at 02:02AM
