Alex Howard’s summary of how New York City is moving to become a ‘premier digital city’ offers some important lessons for Austin.  Here are seven key items we could choose to undertake in Austin:

1. It helps to have the top public official (e.g. Mayor Bloomberg) visibly champion open government, civic apps, and data-driven government.  In particular, I’ve been struck by how often his data-driven refrain is repeated in the press: “In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data.” 

2.  Making a long-term commitment to continuous release of key performance management data even when it is unflattering fosters engagement and credibility.  NYC provides data both through canned, relatively user-friendly applications and data files.  APIs are not fully ready yet, but an acknowledged priority.

3.  NYC created a Chief Digital Officer position (filled by Rachel Sterne) that focuses full-time on open government and is quite a pro-active evangelist to the citizenry, potential civic developers, media and so on.

4.  The Bloomberg administration released a concrete 65-page ‘digital roadmap’ outlining its strategy to make New York a premier digital city.

5.  They have evolved their approach to civic apps to ensure that civic hacking efforts produce quality applications that can be maintained and have an audience, as opposed to a plethora of unsustainable tools. I particularly applaud that NYC is not just focused on citizen-focused, consumerish applications, but also on more boring tools that might boost service productivity and tools aimed at helping the bureaucracy provide better services. 

6. NYC’s Mayor, Chief Digital Officer, and IT leadership all publicly reinforce a view of the ‘city as a platform’ as opposed to seeing open government as just a compliance initiative.  In particular, I am really impressed by how they have internalized the importance of APIs instead of just data dumps.

7. NYC supports the broader emerging open government ecosystem by engaging initiatives such as Open311.

These seven items are an actionable checklist for any Austin policymaker that wishes to claim the local open government leadership mantle.

The City of Austin's Doug Matthews (Chief Communications Director) presented an update on the website re-design at tonight's (3/9/11) Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission's regular meeting.

Below are the key pieces of information shared:

1. 400 vendors were contacted; 20 attended the pre-bid conference.  Only 2 RFP responses were received.  One was non-compliant with MWBE  goals.  The other was poorly organized and constructed. So instead of having the Phase 2 be done by outside vendors, the City will be pursuing the re-design with a mix of existing City staff and external contract consultants. Sounded like Drupal will be the CMS.

2. Total cost will be from $500k to $900k.

3. Mr. Matthews specifically mentioned reaching out to Code for America to coordinate creation of widgets that might be open sourced and wanting to be an "open source leader" in general.

4.  Timeline: City Manager approves new direction in March.  April is used for selection and purchasing of needed hardware and software, as well as configuration.  May and June is used to adapt Phase I
templates.  July and August are used for training of content contributors.  September and October is for core content migration. November and December is for user testing.

5. A community engagement strategy was discussed by Mr. Matthews that included outreach at leading Austin technology events.  Commissioner Rosenthal urged the inclusion of an "independent set of eyes" in the project now that an external vendor was not part of the mix; substantive community engagement was requested sooner rather than later.

Thoughts? Personally, I am excited about this direction.  It's resource-efficient and indeed can position us to be a technology leader if we engage organizations like CfA, as well as Civic Commons, OpenPlans, etc.  I do however want to hear a bit more about how it fits into the City's open data and civic application API plans. Further,  I believe that OpenAustin should be one of the stakeholders
at the table per our partnership agreement.  I look forward to hearing how we can be of help in their community engagement strategy.

Note: SR in the OpenAustin Open311 Conceptual Roadmap Architecture is Service Request, not Service Registry which is Citizen Service Registry (CSR).

Citizen Service Registry Mini-Project

• short name:  Citizen Service Registry
• description:   Catalog the Citizen Services Provided by the top four leading eGov Cities. Propose a common naming convention for the services that are common amongst the candidate cities.
• deliverable(s):  Machine Sensible definition of the Common Citizen Services
• time involved: 2 Weeks for collection and analysis, 1 week for coordination and upgrades with candidate cities
• total calendar time  Start April 5, complete June 15.

WATTS S. HUMPHREY:  "Teams are the most powerful tool mankind has yet devised for doing creative work."
JIMMY WALES, FOUNDER WIKIPEDIA:  "Wikipedia is 10% technology, and 90% community."