#betaNYC: The fate of Open Government in New York City

#betaNYC: The fate of Open Government in New York City

Visualizing NYC’s OpenData

Chris M Whong, BetaNYC’s co-Captian, visualized the 1100+ open datasets made available by New York City. This is a force-directed graph generated with the charting library d3.js. NYC’s open data portal runs on the Socrata platform*, and this visualization was created using the “dataset of datasets” and the Socrata Open Data API (SODA).

Chris writes “Why? The point is to show the scale of the portal, and to illustrate which datasets have user-created views. In the future, it would be great to dynamically size the circles by the popularity of the datasets.

* Chris is employed by Socrata
** GitHub Link

Weiner’s campaign calls for technology advances that we already have

Normally, I would keep my mouth shut about the Mayoral campaign’s talking points, but when they are so willfully un-researched, I have to point them out. Yesterday, Anthony Wiener’s campaign announced 61 additional ideas to keep New York the Capital of the Middle Class.
I’d like to point out one…
112 – Make 311 a ‘Big Data’ Treasure Trove 
“Our 311 city help hotline has fielded over 158 million calls in the past decade. The data about the types of calls and the locations from which they are made are closely- held secrets by the city. This information should be released in raw form. Obviously we would remove any personal information, but giving the public and city workers access to the data might yield effective mapping, trend-spotting, and innovative solutions.”
THESE ARE NOT SECRETS. Since March 7, 2012, the City has had one of the most transformative open data laws. Almost since its inception, NYC DoITT has been publishing 311 requests to the City’s Open Data portal. You can access near realtime calls via NYC 311 map (developed by DoITT), follow them on twitter, or even use an Open311 inquiry API to access NYC’s 311Want to look at 311 data since 2010, visit < nyc.gov/data >.
If any candidate wants to attend any of our hacknights, we’d love to talk about what should be openedBeyond PLUTO, there are many more datasets we would like to see.

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.