[p2p-research] Crowdsourcing and Open Source Planning as Means to Build a Better New York City

[Matt Cooperrider]

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On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
Matt,

below is an excellent article which I'm referencing on the 15th,

perhaps you can add your own commentary based on your own experience and
initiatives?

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Hi Michel,
I've added my response below your original post, so that you can see it how
it might eventually look on the blog.  I'm happy to make any adjustments you
might suggest.
-Matt

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*Citizen engagement + openness = improved p2p
cities*<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=5307>
*[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]* Michel Bauwens
8th October 2009

 City governance and open-source programming never seemed like a likely
marriage. However, emerging initiatives have been working towards it, and
have received a boost of popular support through Obama’s call for open
government. When NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg launched the Big Apps competition
this past June, he invited individuals and groups to program applications
that make government data sets accessible to the public — solidifying that
technology can contribute to improved quality of life. Applications created
in response to Bloomberg’s decisions will join the crowd-sourced initiatives
that already exist in New York City, and already explore methods that can
offer residents not only information, but a place to gain a sense of
community, to exchange ideas and to visualize space digitally.

For more read Olivia Chen’s overview
<http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/10/07/crowd-sourced-initiatives-to-create-a-more-livable-new-york-city/>in
Inhabitat, on New York’s crowdsourced open city initiatives.  Below is a
response from Matt Cooperrider, organizer of the Open Government NYC meetup
group <http://meetup.com/opengovnyc>.
 While Mayor Bloomberg's recent initiatives are innovative and
forward-looking, perhaps his most valuable role for the openness movement in
New York CIty has been as a foil.  This is a mayor so strong that he
steamrolled the City Council into approving a term limits extension so that
he could run for a third term, and then made the 2009 mayoral race a
formality by massively outspending his opponents.  He has consolidated
executive power at the top of one the most arcane and entrenched municipal
governments in the United States.  In a way, this has been beneficial to the
open government and open data movements, as it forces them to make a strong
case and build real political support.

Often, the work of New York City activists takes hold in other cities before
it feeds back home.  Outsiders watch our story unfold, borrow our tactics
and message, and convince their more progressive officials to adopt early.
New York officials get to watch and wait, and implement selectively based on
successes elsewhere.

This summer, City Councilmember Gale Brewer <
http://council.nyc.gov/d6/html/members/home.shtml>, Chair of the Committee
on Technology in Government, introduced legislation <
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19114971/New-York-City-Council-Int-991-Accessibility-to-Public-Records>
mandating an open data policy across all city agencies.  Bloomberg has
fought the bill partly on cost, but his team's core argument has been that
they take a "customer-focused approach" and will release data streams
selectively as customers demand them.  (The New York Observer's Future
Initiative blog has tracked the entire story here <
http://nyfi.observer.com/tags/open-data> under its "open data" tag.)  So,
even though Brewer's legislation might create an innovation ecology that far
surpasses anything that Bloomberg's corporate-model government could
produce, we have not as a movement made a sufficient case.  Meanwhile,
cities like San Francisco and Portland are aggressively releasing their
municipal data.

The Open Planning Project (TOPP) <http://theopenplanningproject.org>, one of
the organizations mentioned in Ms. Chen's article above, has been a major
driver of the open data movement.  They have produced useful one-off
applications, such as FixCity.org <http://fixcity.org/>, which crowdsources
potential locations for new bike racks thus speeding their installation.
They have also acted as stewards of open standards in the Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) community and, more recently, the Open 311
community.  Mayor Bloomberg pioneered the 311 non-emergency telephone-based
citizen information service, but has been slow to open up the data for
mashups by eager civic hackers.  Washington D.C. was the first to move on
this, and TOPP is now stewarding the effort at Open311.org <
http://open311.org> to create a standard for all Open311 APIs in any city.

As part of this effort, TOPP is hosting an Open311 DevCamp at their home
office in New York, where officials from more than 7 cities from across the
Americas will gather to develop best practices.  It wasn't until late last
week, however, after so many other cities got on board, that NYC officials
bothered to acknowledge and RSVP for an innovative event in their own
backyard.

Another telling example can be found in Ms. Chen's article.  Tom Lowenhaupt
has been fighting for almost ten years to bring the .nyc top-level domain to
New York City.  His vision has been to use the revenue generated from this
civic resource to provide digital literacy and civic education through
neighborhood-oriented online community spaces.  In that time, Tom has built
a knowledge base (within a TOPP wiki) that has become a common reference
point for City TLD initiatives globally.  It contains a wide range of
information, including arguments for why a TLD needs to be as carefully
planned as city streets, and the potential civic benefits that can accrue
through such planning.  Tom has worked with parallel initiatives in global
cities such as Paris and Barcelona to develop international standards for
City TLDs, ensuring that non-English speakers can easily access the city's
resources.

Recently, city officials announced their intention to apply for the .nyc
TLD.  They issued an RFP, seeking vendors who are qualified to manage this
resource.  The key criterion for choosing the winner?  Who can produce the
most revenue for the city in the next five years.  There is no mention of
appropriate planning for the allocation of domain names, or synergies with
other global cities.  While other cities may benefit from Tom's grassroots
efforts, New York is looking to make a short term profit from a TLD
"landrush", and will soon find themselves lagging behind more
forward-thinking cities that have benefitted from better digital planning.

In the .nyc case, there is still time for the usual pattern to unfold.
Perhaps officials will look beyond the short-term revenue potential (a
difficult thing to do in this economy) and learn from other cities some
lessons that they, ironically, learned in the first place from a determined
New Yorker.  There is incredible civic innovation in NYC, in some ways
strengthened by the resistance it faces.  But we don't always reap what we
sow, and when we do we are often served last.
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