Yesterday, I testified before the New York City Council Committee on Technology in Government. You can read my written testimony, which talks about all the wonderful things we can do with raw feeds of government data.
Everybody at the hearing, including the bill’s opponents, agree that city government should be giving data back to the people from whom they collect it. The question at this point is what form that information sharing will take. The Bloomberg administration wants to provide simplified, polished web services that are fit for use by end users. Councilwoman Gale Brewer thinks that’s a fine idea, but she also wants to create feeds of raw data for people to do with as they please. My testimony made a practical case that if the city freed the data, the citizenry would provide the end-user services.
Not a lot of freedom talk in that testimony, mainly because it wasn’t a good forum in which to reframe viewpoints. A lot of us mentioned Free Software, but nobody really got down and offered the full sermon. The format simply wouldn’t allow it, which is, on some level, disappointing.
At any rate, I’m told that it would help the legislation’s chances if we had more examples of what people would do with city data. Send me any good ideas.
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