https://www.lotico.com/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=Data_Gov_TranscriptData Gov Transcript - Revision history2026-05-01T08:48:46ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.45.3https://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6651&oldid=prevMarco at 15:59, 17 April 20262026-04-17T15:59:16Z<p></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Thank you very much. This is a real honor to be here and I'm certainly not going to be half as knowledgeable as the speakers who come after me, but I will try to give you a picture of what's going on in city government particularly from the legislature side. I've been in the city council since 2002 and I've always worked in government or a little bit in the private sector but always believed that government data should be public and that's almost an oxymoron because so much of it is not. So even years ago I built the first city website from scratch and even put up some little preliminary kiosks years ago in front of city hall. it had to be temporary because otherwise the landmarks commission would get upset. So you always have to work around things.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Thank you very much. This is a real honor to be here and I'm certainly not going to be half as knowledgeable as the speakers who come after me, but I will try to give you a picture of what's going on in city government particularly from the legislature side. I've been in the city council since 2002 and I've always worked in government or a little bit in the private sector but always believed that government data should be public and that's almost an oxymoron because so much of it is not. So even years ago I built the first city website from scratch and even put up some little preliminary kiosks years ago in front of city hall. it had to be temporary because otherwise the landmarks commission would get upset. So you always have to work around things.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>But I've always believed in this idea of public information should be public and when I came into the council I was head of made head of the u at that point it was a subcommittee on technology and then for the next eight years it was one of the 40 city council committees. There are actually 51 members of the city council for those of you who don't have the pleasure of spending all your time in city hall. there are 51 members and the budget of the city now is now 63 billion. There are about 303,000 employees. It's the fourth largest budget in the United States. United States budget is bigger. State of California, state of New York, and then New York City. So it's bigger than Massachusetts and Cal and Texas and Florida and so on. So it's really like a and half the countries of the world were bigger than half the countries of the world. So technology plays a role. Needless to say, I think government is always slower. You know that from those of you who either work for government or work with government or try to get information. So for the last eight years, we've been holding hearings when really nobody had ever had hearings on technology in government before. We had hearings right after 911 about how technology helped as much as was possible in that horrific situation in the aftermath tracking and Verizon got back up pretty quickly and all the things that 9/11 had to deal with and all we've had hearings on of course the maps and we've had hearings on clouds and we've had hearings on spectrum and we've had hearings on the everything the franchises with Verizon and the cables. I mean there's no topic we haven't kind of looked at but the one that and broadband we brought passed a bill that said that we had to have hearings in all five buraus to see whether there was or was not accessible lowcost broadband in the five buraus and of course there's lots of it but it's expensive and not very fast and so it's sort of like a a a mish mash of different topics, but the one that is always hiding I think a little bit is the data. there is in the city anybody here work for the city of New York? Are there people besides So there's a couple of us couple of us. the city of New York does have a very vibrant I guess it's a closed meeting but I go fairly regularly and it's all of the <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">CIOS </del>in the different agencies who meet on a regular basis and it really amazing I think because these are the men and women who have to make things work for this huge city and you know they're they're under represented in the you know newspapers on the positive note every day. But there I don't know how many we have 80 city agencies probably more but the official ones are 80 and so there's probably there's obviously many people and this group comes together I think it's called the municipal data council and they come together with the commissioner of do it and other agencies on a regular basis to talk about what their issues are and what their challenges are and how they can work together and how things aren't working and so on and there's a big push now to try to make more centralized because the agencies police departments the worst but don't tell anybody I said that they're very siloed you know they want to do everything in their own little world and I'm sure that's true in academia but it's really true with city agencies so given that whole backdrop and based on other cities we're always looking New York City thinks we know everything but we do try to think particularly on the tech front are there other cities that are doing interesting things and I think on the issue of open data No, that's true. Now, the mayor, uh, Bloomberg did, as you know, a couple of times, at least once, and I think there's another one coming up, and some of you may have participated, um, you know, had an apps conference. I went to the opening, uh, of one, and it was it was exciting. The only problem for me, and I'm just going to speak for myself, was it was all based on parking spots and I don't know, God, things that, you know, they're important, but I'm interested in how you can help New Yorkers. Maybe getting the parking as part of parking. But anyway, the issue was the data that was available was only those that either the city thought was easily lowhanging fruit or one that u somebody who was doing the apps had requested. Now if you don't it's like anything else if you don't know the data is there how are you going to request it? So it was it's a very small subset of all the data that's available. So we introduced a bill that said that the data has to be available.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>But I've always believed in this idea of public information should be public and when I came into the council I was head of made head of the u at that point it was a subcommittee on technology and then for the next eight years it was one of the 40 city council committees. There are actually 51 members of the city council for those of you who don't have the pleasure of spending all your time in city hall. there are 51 members and the budget of the city now is now 63 billion. There are about 303,000 employees. It's the fourth largest budget in the United States. United States budget is bigger. State of California, state of New York, and then New York City. So it's bigger than Massachusetts and Cal and Texas and Florida and so on. So it's really like a and half the countries of the world were bigger than half the countries of the world. So technology plays a role. Needless to say, I think government is always slower. You know that from those of you who either work for government or work with government or try to get information. So for the last eight years, we've been holding hearings when really nobody had ever had hearings on technology in government before. We had hearings right after 911 about how technology helped as much as was possible in that horrific situation in the aftermath tracking and Verizon got back up pretty quickly and all the things that 9/11 had to deal with and all we've had hearings on of course the maps and we've had hearings on clouds and we've had hearings on spectrum and we've had hearings on the everything the franchises with Verizon and the cables. I mean there's no topic we haven't kind of looked at but the one that and broadband we brought passed a bill that said that we had to have hearings in all five buraus to see whether there was or was not accessible lowcost broadband in the five buraus and of course there's lots of it but it's expensive and not very fast and so it's sort of like a a a mish mash of different topics, but the one that is always hiding I think a little bit is the data. there is in the city anybody here work for the city of New York? Are there people besides So there's a couple of us couple of us. the city of New York does have a very vibrant I guess it's a closed meeting but I go fairly regularly and it's all of the <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">CIO's </ins>in the different agencies who meet on a regular basis and it really amazing I think because these are the men and women who have to make things work for this huge city and you know they're they're under represented in the you know newspapers on the positive note every day. But there I don't know how many we have 80 city agencies probably more but the official ones are 80 and so there's probably there's obviously many people and this group comes together I think it's called the municipal data council and they come together with the commissioner of do it and other agencies on a regular basis to talk about what their issues are and what their challenges are and how they can work together and how things aren't working and so on and there's a big push now to try to make more centralized because the agencies police departments the worst but don't tell anybody I said that they're very siloed you know they want to do everything in their own little world and I'm sure that's true in academia but it's really true with city agencies so given that whole backdrop and based on other cities we're always looking New York City thinks we know everything but we do try to think particularly on the tech front are there other cities that are doing interesting things and I think on the issue of open data No, that's true. Now, the mayor, uh, Bloomberg did, as you know, a couple of times, at least once, and I think there's another one coming up, and some of you may have participated, um, you know, had an apps conference. I went to the opening, uh, of one, and it was it was exciting. The only problem for me, and I'm just going to speak for myself, was it was all based on parking spots and I don't know, God, things that, you know, they're important, but I'm interested in how you can help New Yorkers. Maybe getting the parking as part of parking. But anyway, the issue was the data that was available was only those that either the city thought was easily lowhanging fruit or one that u somebody who was doing the apps had requested. Now if you don't it's like anything else if you don't know the data is there how are you going to request it? So it was it's a very small subset of all the data that's available. So we introduced a bill that said that the data has to be available.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>We did it in 2009 and we did it again when we started a new session in 2010. So now we're actually had a hearing in June this of this past June and the issue is whether we can pass intro 29 of 2010. And what this legislation says is that the city of New York needs to make its data available in a format that is accessible to the general public, not in some formula that nobody can understand, even with the apps. And some of you may have won the contest or participated in the contest. You had to be one of you in the room to understand how to make it something that the public could understand. So we I obviously my background is human services and housing and things like that. So I want something that people working in the nonprofit sector can use to figure out where's the affordable housing how many homeless do we really have and what are their needs and so on and so forth. So at this moment just to give you an update and I can go through the bill in a minute but at this moment we've had a couple of meetings with the new commissioner Carol Post. she came from the office of operations. She's been there, I think, since December of last year, and she did say in her opening statement to the city council that she wants this bill to pass. Now, of course, you always hear that and you want to make sure that it's this bill or something that's much too narrow, in which case it's not this bill, but to her credit, she has had meeting with us, meaning the city council, and she has met with all of the so maybe 80 or fewer agencies, but all the agencies, and she's giving them time, a little bit of time, not much, this fall to meet goals or to come up with goals. so they can have open data. And the idea there would be she's got certain criteria that they have to meet and the agencies have deadlines. and when we're going to meet again, I think it's either the end of September or the beginning of October to figure out uh which agencies are meeting their goals and their timelines and which are not. Now, there are some agencies, and you probably know this, when you call 311, has anybody ever called 311? You probably Okay, good. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But it is generally u an amazing talk about databases that is an amazing database. but those sometimes the agency can quickly respond and sometimes it's a legacy system and it has to go through a whole bunch of channels before a you get an answer but b you get data. So she's dealing with some agencies that have some very old hardware and is not compatible with anything that's helpful. So she's trying to figure out how to make this data accessible in the broadest format. And of course we're pushing very very hard. Secondly, costsaving. Anything that saves money in today's world is a good thing. If you haven't foiled freedom of information law, you may be the only New Yorkers who've never foiled because many, many New Yorkers file. Reporters file, journalists file, upset New Yorkers file. Um, I used to work in a city agency that was always getting foiled. And that is a very timeconsuming response because often it's given to be honest with you to a low-level intern.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>We did it in 2009 and we did it again when we started a new session in 2010. So now we're actually had a hearing in June this of this past June and the issue is whether we can pass intro 29 of 2010. And what this legislation says is that the city of New York needs to make its data available in a format that is accessible to the general public, not in some formula that nobody can understand, even with the apps. And some of you may have won the contest or participated in the contest. You had to be one of you in the room to understand how to make it something that the public could understand. So we I obviously my background is human services and housing and things like that. So I want something that people working in the nonprofit sector can use to figure out where's the affordable housing how many homeless do we really have and what are their needs and so on and so forth. So at this moment just to give you an update and I can go through the bill in a minute but at this moment we've had a couple of meetings with the new commissioner Carol Post. she came from the office of operations. She's been there, I think, since December of last year, and she did say in her opening statement to the city council that she wants this bill to pass. Now, of course, you always hear that and you want to make sure that it's this bill or something that's much too narrow, in which case it's not this bill, but to her credit, she has had meeting with us, meaning the city council, and she has met with all of the so maybe 80 or fewer agencies, but all the agencies, and she's giving them time, a little bit of time, not much, this fall to meet goals or to come up with goals. so they can have open data. And the idea there would be she's got certain criteria that they have to meet and the agencies have deadlines. and when we're going to meet again, I think it's either the end of September or the beginning of October to figure out uh which agencies are meeting their goals and their timelines and which are not. Now, there are some agencies, and you probably know this, when you call 311, has anybody ever called 311? You probably Okay, good. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But it is generally u an amazing talk about databases that is an amazing database. but those sometimes the agency can quickly respond and sometimes it's a legacy system and it has to go through a whole bunch of channels before a you get an answer but b you get data. So she's dealing with some agencies that have some very old hardware and is not compatible with anything that's helpful. So she's trying to figure out how to make this data accessible in the broadest format. And of course we're pushing very very hard. Secondly, costsaving. Anything that saves money in today's world is a good thing. If you haven't foiled freedom of information law, you may be the only New Yorkers who've never foiled because many, many New Yorkers file. Reporters file, journalists file, upset New Yorkers file. Um, I used to work in a city agency that was always getting foiled. And that is a very timeconsuming response because often it's given to be honest with you to a low-level intern.</div></td></tr>
</table>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6650&oldid=prevMarco at 15:41, 17 April 20262026-04-17T15:41:45Z<p></p>
<a href="https://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6650&oldid=6649">Show changes</a>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6649&oldid=prevMarco at 15:40, 17 April 20262026-04-17T15:40:34Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 15:40, 17 April 2026</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Other people have generated ontology spectrums as well. This is one of the simpler ones that it goes from so essentially you're capturing meaning anywhere from simple level like a catalog entry so just a text string to a much more formal very specific definition of meaning like we might encode in first order logic or a higher order logic. And right now what we're seeing on the web is relatively inexpressive. So simpleish encodings of meaning like controlled vocabulary. So usually in a single language often English to just a small amount of information saying that like maybe this this shirt is a kind of clothing. So just a simple taxonomy to shirt is made of particular kinds of materials. So I might have properties made from and I might go on to more and more descriptions more and more complex descriptions about how terms relate to each other. And when we go into the science domain that Peter's going to talk about more in the next talk, we'll see more expressive encodings of meaning. But all along the spectrum you can get tremendous value. And so actually one of the themes is that ontologies and formal encodings of meaning that are computationally understandable are gaining traction. and another theme is that capturing some encoding even if it's just a natural language about where the information came from is incredibly important. So a definition that we like to use for provenence is the origin or source from which something comes. Intention for use. Who or what generated who or what the material was generated for. The manner of manufacturer. History of subsequent owners. Sense of place and time of manufacturer production or discovery documented in detail sufficient to allow reproducibility.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Other people have generated ontology spectrums as well. This is one of the simpler ones that it goes from so essentially you're capturing meaning anywhere from simple level like a catalog entry so just a text string to a much more formal very specific definition of meaning like we might encode in first order logic or a higher order logic. And right now what we're seeing on the web is relatively inexpressive. So simpleish encodings of meaning like controlled vocabulary. So usually in a single language often English to just a small amount of information saying that like maybe this this shirt is a kind of clothing. So just a simple taxonomy to shirt is made of particular kinds of materials. So I might have properties made from and I might go on to more and more descriptions more and more complex descriptions about how terms relate to each other. And when we go into the science domain that Peter's going to talk about more in the next talk, we'll see more expressive encodings of meaning. But all along the spectrum you can get tremendous value. And so actually one of the themes is that ontologies and formal encodings of meaning that are computationally understandable are gaining traction. and another theme is that capturing some encoding even if it's just a natural language about where the information came from is incredibly important. So a definition that we like to use for provenence is the origin or source from which something comes. Intention for use. Who or what generated who or what the material was generated for. The manner of manufacturer. History of subsequent owners. Sense of place and time of manufacturer production or discovery documented in detail sufficient to allow reproducibility.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>So that's just providence alone. Then pick your favorite definition of knowledge. I picked a few just to put up here but basically some kind of belief fact or condition of being aware of something and then put them together. So where did the knowledge actually come from? And now we've got knowledge providence. So why do you care about knowledge providence? So hopefully you got some sense of why the NIH uh</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>So that's just providence alone. Then pick your favorite definition of knowledge. I picked a few just to put up here but basically some kind of belief fact or condition of being aware of something and then put them together. So where did the knowledge actually come from? And now we've got knowledge providence. So why do you care about knowledge providence? So hopefully you got some sense of why the NIH uh researchers might care. So how recent is this data? How reliable is it? When are they going to depend on it? Um, I've spent a career trying to make knowledge representation useful and so, uh, done a lot of sponsored research projects, interviewed tons of users, um, who essentially always say the same thing. You know, if you don't tell me why I should believe this, I'm not one going to fund you, and two, I'm not going to take action on the answers that your system is giving to me. So, I presume that we're going to make these viewraphs available. I just put them in there for a couple of uh articles that you could go look at where intelligence analysts say they're not going to listen to intelligence programs unless they can understand where the data came from. Intelligent assistance users aren't going to take the recommendations. virtual observatory users that actually Peter might have a few view graphs from an joint effort that we did on virtual observatories. They want to know where the data come came from and these are all fairly well documented with user studies showing that they're not going to accept it without that information. And there's tremendous growth in this area. So the worldwide web consortium which if you're going to look for standards on web technology that's the first standards body I look at. There's a providence incubator group. I'm on that group as well. There's some really nice documents that I really just included here so that you would have a place to go look for if you cared more about Providence. And there's a lot of quotes from all sorts of wonderful famous people like our friend Tim Bruce Lee who is famous for talking about oh yeah, you know, so if I show you something, he wants to be able to say oh yeah or why or huh. so basically that's what this whole line of research is about. So that at any time that you see something you can say why should I believe that or where did it come from. So the position that we take is that system transparency or being able to have that information about where it came from and why you might believe it and why you might disbelieve it supports understanding and trust and allows you to look at a system and and know when to take action on it. So one research goal one line of research that we're pursuing is to make interoperable infrastructure that supports this that supports explanations of everything sources assumptions answers etc. And we have built a lot of infrastructure that we've used in a wide variety of applications from um scientific virtual observatories that if you get this picture what did that picture rely on? where was the data set coming from? if you had amazing eyesight, you would be able to see in here some metadata about the weather conditions under which that data was collected. to intelligent assistance that you can say what are you doing and why? and it says it's waiting for approval. it says what it's doing right now and what rule it's following to one of my favorites because I'm a big wine and food person. to something that recommends wines with meals and why you might take that. So here it's recommending Braftoft Chardonnay for actually I don't see the question that it's being asked to recommend for but why you might take that recommendation and what information it relied on to intelligence settings of the data that it was actually coming from. Actually New York Times people might like this.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>researchers might care. So how recent is this data? How reliable is it? When are they going to depend on it? Um, I've spent a career trying to make knowledge representation useful and so, uh, done a lot of sponsored research projects, interviewed tons of users, um, who essentially always say the same thing. You know, if you don't tell me why I should believe this, I'm not one going to fund you, and two, I'm not going to take action on the answers that your system is giving to me. So, I presume that we're going to make these viewraphs available. I just put them in there for a couple of uh articles that you could go look at where intelligence analysts say they're not going to listen to intelligence programs unless they can understand where the data came from. Intelligent assistance users aren't going to take the recommendations. virtual observatory users that actually Peter might have a few view graphs from an joint effort that we did on virtual observatories. They want to know where the data come came from and these are all fairly well documented with user studies showing that they're not going to accept it without that information. And there's tremendous growth in this area. So the worldwide web consortium which if you're going to look for standards on web technology that's the first standards body I look at. There's a providence incubator group. I'm on that group as well. There's some really nice documents that I really just included here so that you would have a place to go look for if you cared more about Providence. And there's a lot of quotes from all sorts of wonderful famous people like our friend Tim Bruce Lee who is famous for talking about oh yeah, you know, so if I show you something, he wants to be able to say oh yeah or why or huh. so basically that's what this whole line of research is about. So that at any time that you see something you can say why should I believe that or where did it come from. So the position that we take is that system transparency or being able to have that information about where it came from and why you might believe it and why you might disbelieve it supports understanding and trust and allows you to look at a system and and know when to take action on it. So one research goal one line of research that we're pursuing is to make interoperable infrastructure that supports this that supports explanations of everything sources assumptions answers etc. And we have built a lot of infrastructure that we've used in a wide variety of applications from um scientific virtual observatories that if you get this picture what did that picture rely on? where was the data set coming from? if you had amazing eyesight, you would be able to see in here some metadata about the weather conditions under which that data was collected. to intelligent assistance that you can say what are you doing and why? and it says it's waiting for approval. it says what it's doing right now and what rule it's following to one of my favorites because I'm a big wine and food person. to something that recommends wines with meals and why you might take that. So here it's recommending Braftoft Chardonnay for actually I don't see the question that it's being asked to recommend for but why you might take that recommendation and what information it relied on to intelligence settings of the data that it was actually coming from. Actually New York Times people might like this.</div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>So you can see the the portion of the document that it's actually relying on and then there's kind of a fancy reasoning system in the back end that's saying what it took out of that and why to taking recommendations on how to deconlict two airline paths that somebody had identified are likely to crash. So we might want to deconlict them and so this is a solution about how to resolve the conflict. So it's a wide range of applications. Oh to to prove combination. So you know might not want to just see one person or one system that believes a particular answer.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>So you can see the the portion of the document that it's actually relying on and then there's kind of a fancy reasoning system in the back end that's saying what it took out of that and why to taking recommendations on how to deconlict two airline paths that somebody had identified are likely to crash. So we might want to deconlict them and so this is a solution about how to resolve the conflict. So it's a wide range of applications. Oh to to prove combination. So you know might not want to just see one person or one system that believes a particular answer.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>But this is showing a lot of different systems that believe the same answer and it also will go and show the systems that believe the opposite of that answer. So, the thing that this all has in common is it's trying to let people look in at what's behind the scenes before they decide that they're going to buy that bankra Chardonnay or before they beat up the agent for why it's waiting, before they think it's broken so they can find out what it thinks it's doing or before you take this data set and start using it in your experiments, you might want to know more information about it. Okay. Okay. So, I just got three minutes. I'm going to go through. Okay. So and these days when we're doing this from a data set coming up with a demo using data from a particular agency what's really going on is we grab that data we transform it we revise it we probably archive it we make some deductions based on it we derive these pretty demos and then what we want to do is make it so that people can see when they want to use it and when they want to combine it. I'm going to skip through one of my application areas and there's backend encodings that help me also look at error conditions and oh Jim looked at this demo when in the previous talk. So, one of these applications was looking at the foreign aid and there were some questions about this demo. Um, so one of the things that you might want to do when you look at the demo is say I don't really believe that data. I'm not an expert on that data, but that seems to go against the things that I would have believed.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>But this is showing a lot of different systems that believe the same answer and it also will go and show the systems that believe the opposite of that answer. So, the thing that this all has in common is it's trying to let people look in at what's behind the scenes before they decide that they're going to buy that bankra Chardonnay or before they beat up the agent for why it's waiting, before they think it's broken so they can find out what it thinks it's doing or before you take this data set and start using it in your experiments, you might want to know more information about it. Okay. Okay. So, I just got three minutes. I'm going to go through. Okay. So and these days when we're doing this from a data set coming up with a demo using data from a particular agency what's really going on is we grab that data we transform it we revise it we probably archive it we make some deductions based on it we derive these pretty demos and then what we want to do is make it so that people can see when they want to use it and when they want to combine it. I'm going to skip through one of my application areas and there's backend encodings that help me also look at error conditions and oh Jim looked at this demo when in the previous talk. So, one of these applications was looking at the foreign aid and there were some questions about this demo. Um, so one of the things that you might want to do when you look at the demo is say I don't really believe that data. I'm not an expert on that data, but that seems to go against the things that I would have believed.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>So, I might want to annotate it. So, hoping that an expert then will go in and look at it and see whether it's right or wrong. So now what we're doing is we're going in and annotating a number of these applications with information about where the data came from and allowing people to do things like ask question or actually this demo isn't annotated this way but one of the other ones is mashed up against in fact we should do this with our NR data against a New York Times data set that goes on in and says okay what was going on at this particular time period what's being reported in the New New York Times or any particular data set that you have access to that's going that's in this time period where I think it's interesting. So back to my original slides for the NIH where the taxation was zooming up. You know what was going on then? I finally talked to a tobacco researcher and said, "Well, that was the time that 46 states settled with the US government for having to support additional health care costs and all of a sudden taxation went up 45 cents a pack." You know, I didn't I didn't smoke. I didn't pay attention to that, but you know, that was an interesting event that I should go back and I don't know whether we've got data that far back from the New York Times, but we have some of the New York Times data set to see whether that would actually come out as a hypothesis for letting people look to see what's really going on there.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>So, I might want to annotate it. So, hoping that an expert then will go in and look at it and see whether it's right or wrong. So now what we're doing is we're going in and annotating a number of these applications with information about where the data came from and allowing people to do things like ask question or actually this demo isn't annotated this way but one of the other ones is mashed up against in fact we should do this with our NR data against a New York Times data set that goes on in and says okay what was going on at this particular time period what's being reported in the New New York Times or any particular data set that you have access to that's going that's in this time period where I think it's interesting. So back to my original slides for the NIH where the taxation was zooming up. You know what was going on then? I finally talked to a tobacco researcher and said, "Well, that was the time that 46 states settled with the US government for having to support additional health care costs and all of a sudden taxation went up 45 cents a pack." You know, I didn't I didn't smoke. I didn't pay attention to that, but you know, that was an interesting event that I should go back and I don't know whether we've got data that far back from the New York Times, but we have some of the New York Times data set to see whether that would actually come out as a hypothesis for letting people look to see what's really going on there.</div></td></tr>
</table>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6648&oldid=prevMarco at 15:39, 17 April 20262026-04-17T15:39:47Z<p></p>
<a href="https://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6648&oldid=6647">Show changes</a>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6647&oldid=prevMarco at 15:37, 17 April 20262026-04-17T15:37:37Z<p></p>
<a href="https://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6647&oldid=6646">Show changes</a>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6646&oldid=prevMarco at 13:50, 17 April 20262026-04-17T13:50:55Z<p></p>
<a href="https://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6646&oldid=6645">Show changes</a>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6645&oldid=prevMarco at 13:48, 17 April 20262026-04-17T13:48:36Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 13:48, 17 April 2026</td>
</tr><tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l14">Line 14:</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And that intern has to gather all the material that the upset person or journalist is interested in and supposedly gets back to you in a certain time period, but you can always get an extension. So it's my just one example and it's very timeconuming because you got 80 city agencies often corporation council has to get involved if it's a more high level request and of course what is responded to and what's blacked out is obviouslyimportant. Um, so the fact of the matter is that I think that if you have a lot of this data up on the web in a format that people can understand that you will not get as many foils and you won't have to be answering all of these endless and sometimes important and sometimes there'll still be foils, but it's a cost-saving measure and I want to add that because people those of us who just want the data out there to be able to work on it and use it practically and to help save lives and make people's lives earlier here don't see it also as a cost-saving measure. So I think that's extremely extremely important. the other thing I want to mention is that there is you know there's a lot of interest in this legislation. Obviously people in the public sector who are writing about what the city is or isn't doing or interested in it. people from like Common Cause and the groups that work on Citizens Union and groups that work on public access have testified over and over in support. and I think what comes up again and again is what kind of format that the data has to be in. And that's something that some of you in the room might have some good ideas about and certainly something that the city is trying to take note of. That is definitely part of intro 29 of 2010 is having data that's in an accessible format. the other issue I think is you know how do you how does the city decide and how do we advocate to know which agencies will produce and which not it's always challenging with the police department. and I obviously were concerned about health records. Something that just sort of an aside some of you may have seen checkbook NYC. It was just put up a couple July 1st by controller John Louu and Checkbook NYC is an amazing amount of data. Not something that you need to manipulate at all, but it is every penny that the city spends every day. It's updated daily. It's about 35 billion that's up there now out of a budget of 35 billion. But this is about 35 billion. And it has you can search, you know, it says that the department of health has spent money on pharmaceuticals and doctors and pediatricians and that the mayor's office has bought liquor, but they're going to get reimbured for a party. And it says how many car services the board of elections has used when the workers go home late, etc., etc. For those of us who interested in gossip and, you know, things like that, it's fabulous. So for those of you who are interested in more mundane things like tech and things that a little bit more professional, it's also there. what's not there because they're working at it is the salaries of the workers in a because there's a lot of concern about that kind of privatization and they're worried about whether people would be stocked or home at home home names if that kind of thing is still not up there and it will be. But I all I I mention that first of all it's a fun site. You should look at it. But I also mention that because I think the city is finally getting the message that data that's public needs to be public. And so one part of it is where does the city spend their money?</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And that intern has to gather all the material that the upset person or journalist is interested in and supposedly gets back to you in a certain time period, but you can always get an extension. So it's my just one example and it's very timeconuming because you got 80 city agencies often corporation council has to get involved if it's a more high level request and of course what is responded to and what's blacked out is obviouslyimportant. Um, so the fact of the matter is that I think that if you have a lot of this data up on the web in a format that people can understand that you will not get as many foils and you won't have to be answering all of these endless and sometimes important and sometimes there'll still be foils, but it's a cost-saving measure and I want to add that because people those of us who just want the data out there to be able to work on it and use it practically and to help save lives and make people's lives earlier here don't see it also as a cost-saving measure. So I think that's extremely extremely important. the other thing I want to mention is that there is you know there's a lot of interest in this legislation. Obviously people in the public sector who are writing about what the city is or isn't doing or interested in it. people from like Common Cause and the groups that work on Citizens Union and groups that work on public access have testified over and over in support. and I think what comes up again and again is what kind of format that the data has to be in. And that's something that some of you in the room might have some good ideas about and certainly something that the city is trying to take note of. That is definitely part of intro 29 of 2010 is having data that's in an accessible format. the other issue I think is you know how do you how does the city decide and how do we advocate to know which agencies will produce and which not it's always challenging with the police department. and I obviously were concerned about health records. Something that just sort of an aside some of you may have seen checkbook NYC. It was just put up a couple July 1st by controller John Louu and Checkbook NYC is an amazing amount of data. Not something that you need to manipulate at all, but it is every penny that the city spends every day. It's updated daily. It's about 35 billion that's up there now out of a budget of 35 billion. But this is about 35 billion. And it has you can search, you know, it says that the department of health has spent money on pharmaceuticals and doctors and pediatricians and that the mayor's office has bought liquor, but they're going to get reimbured for a party. And it says how many car services the board of elections has used when the workers go home late, etc., etc. For those of us who interested in gossip and, you know, things like that, it's fabulous. So for those of you who are interested in more mundane things like tech and things that a little bit more professional, it's also there. what's not there because they're working at it is the salaries of the workers in a because there's a lot of concern about that kind of privatization and they're worried about whether people would be stocked or home at home home names if that kind of thing is still not up there and it will be. But I all I I mention that first of all it's a fun site. You should look at it. But I also mention that because I think the city is finally getting the message that data that's public needs to be public. And so one part of it is where does the city spend their money?</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Where does your tax money go? And already just the other day somebody did a story about car washing because it turns out the Daily News must have seen a police car being washed. I don't know how the reporter started on the story, but then he realized that there are like 10 different agencies and it's a hodgepodge of which government car is washed at which car wash. And then unfortunately somebody got a car wash for like $126 or something that's very expensive car wash. And so from there it was a story, but he got all of his information from putting the word car wash or some something like that into checkbook NYC. Um, so that's good for the public to know and hopefully we'll have some hearings and maybe there'll be vendor car washing in terms of the value for the dollar. But this particular legislation is is larger in the sense that it is looking at the data sets that you as people who know how to academics and your jobs figure out how you can take this data and make it useful to the public and that will never get done by government. Um, and so it's absolutely necessary. It's your data. It's your right to have that data. But at the same time, in this in today's world, what I think is so exciting about it, it can create jobs and it can create information and hopefully make people's lives better. So on so many different levels, this is a very exciting opportunity. how we get to that point is what we're advocating for as much as possible. and then just finally, you know, there's so many questions that have to be answered. What's the record policy? How long do you keep the data for? Um, we're already running into some of those questions even without a large large amount available to the public. What are the technical standards? Um, is it based on agencies or is it across the board in terms of the standards? Is it one data portal, XML, raw data, support, RSS? Um, and you know, just something that's readable. And then of course I would be a big believer particularly in the nonprofit sector, you'd actually have to have some classes and some training. I think for some of the nonprofit sector people who could really use this data to be able to use it more effectively. I think that the Washington DC apps for democracy, some of you may know that has done has actually saved money and is doing the kind of work that we would like to see done in New York. A lot of times the</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Where does your tax money go? And already just the other day somebody did a story about car washing because it turns out the Daily News must have seen a police car being washed. I don't know how the reporter started on the story, but then he realized that there are like 10 different agencies and it's a hodgepodge of which government car is washed at which car wash. And then unfortunately somebody got a car wash for like $126 or something that's very expensive car wash. And so from there it was a story, but he got all of his information from putting the word car wash or some something like that into checkbook NYC. Um, so that's good for the public to know and hopefully we'll have some hearings and maybe there'll be vendor car washing in terms of the value for the dollar. But this particular legislation is is larger in the sense that it is looking at the data sets that you as people who know how to academics and your jobs figure out how you can take this data and make it useful to the public and that will never get done by government. Um, and so it's absolutely necessary. It's your data. It's your right to have that data. But at the same time, in this in today's world, what I think is so exciting about it, it can create jobs and it can create information and hopefully make people's lives better. So on so many different levels, this is a very exciting opportunity. how we get to that point is what we're advocating for as much as possible. and then just finally, you know, there's so many questions that have to be answered. What's the record policy? How long do you keep the data for? Um, we're already running into some of those questions even without a large large amount available to the public. What are the technical standards? Um, is it based on agencies or is it across the board in terms of the standards? Is it one data portal, XML, raw data, support, RSS? Um, and you know, just something that's readable. And then of course I would be a big believer particularly in the nonprofit sector, you'd actually have to have some classes and some training. I think for some of the nonprofit sector people who could really use this data to be able to use it more effectively. I think that the Washington DC apps for democracy, some of you may know that has done has actually saved money and is doing the kind of work that we would like to see done in New York. A lot of times the updating is a problem. If you ever go to a government website, you will find at least in some cases, it's not updated as often as some of the ones in the private sector because there's obviously a perhaps a bigger motive to try to get the private sector ones updated. I find I always tell my staff, don't rely just on the web. You got to pick up the phone to get the real data because it's not necessarily going to be correct. We had a big challenge even with the 311 data. Um, the community boards. Has anybody ever been to a community board meeting? I hope somebody like three people have been to Oh, four have been to a community board meeting. I I' I've probably been to 5,000 community board meetings. So, just to give you an example of the challenging of of elected office, but there are 59 community boards in New York City. And for those of you not from New York, they're like little little city halls.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>updating is a problem. If you ever go to a government website, you will find at least in some cases, it's not updated as often as some of the ones in the private sector because there's obviously a perhaps a bigger motive to try to get the private sector ones updated. I find I always tell my staff, don't rely just on the web. You got to pick up the phone to get the real data because it's not necessarily going to be correct. We had a big challenge even with the 311 data. Um, the community boards. Has anybody ever been to a community board meeting? I hope somebody like three people have been to Oh, four have been to a community board meeting. I I' I've probably been to 5,000 community board meetings. So, just to give you an example of the challenging of of elected office, but there are 59 community boards in New York City. And for those of you not from New York, they're like little little city halls.</div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There's a staff of about three people and then there are 50 citizens. Anybody who is interested, you can apply to the B president and get on and if you're been to some meetings and you have an interest in putting some time into the neighborhood, you'll learn a lot. But there's a lot of data there. Um, you know, the street lights go out, the road needs paving, um, the applications for zoning, the applications for enclosed and unenced sidewalk cafes, and I could go on and on. at the same time and those often are either dealt with locally, passed on locally, but certainly have a knowledge locally. You even have situations where the movie people come in and if you're on the west side, everybody hates them even though they're great for the economy. How many of those permits are let on any given moment in Manhattan? Because we always want them to go to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Please go somewhere else. But you know, that kind of information would be so helpful to regular New Yorkers. why am I getting all the movies and I can't get a parking space? You know, that's the kind of thing that people really actually want to know. but the community boards are not in real time with 311. So you call 311 and the community board doesn't know it. So, we're trying to think of ways that community boards which are run by city employees can in fact have that real-time data because often this is an example of the importance of this data sharing because the community boards would like to know have a 100 people called about the street light or am I the only am I only getting one complaint or is are 100 people complaining about a road that's not paved or am I the only is the only complaint coming from me because if there are of people calling then we'd like to be more active in trying to solve the problem. So there's also something called scout. These people in the city I've never actually seen them. They run around little golf carts and they find problems but they don't share them in real time with the community boards. They give the data in centrally. So I'm giving you some examples of some of this huge data opportunity that's out there and that we'd like to capture with intro 29 in 2010. So, I I'm going to stop there. We can certainly talk about it later. I would love if people have the time to either write to the mayor or to Speaker Quinn to say that you'd like to have intro 29 of 2010, you can send an email passed in some form because you think that having government data be public is a good thing. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for coming. I just want to make sure that you want to take one or two questions if you have one. I think it's interesting that you characterize the police department as being behind this sort of stuff because the public perception is that internally like blockby crime data and predictive analysis they're actually cutting edge on this. Yeah, I I wasn't correct. They're not behind. They won't share it. That's the problem. In other words, they're very the comat is excellent. obviously they're doing a great job on terrorism. So now they have 1,000 police officers as we're sitting here on computers. So that could be everything from comat to looking at porno and dealing with those crazy people. Porno meaning not them but making sure that others are not doing it. Cutting and also looking at the issue of terrorism 1,000 officers. That's a lot of people. So, no, they're very and they have NYC win, which of course is the system that I didn't talk about, which is a citywide a first responder system wireless, and they're able now in the near future to have much more connectivity and instant real-time info in the cars. But they're the only problem is they don't like to share anything. That's the little problem.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There's a staff of about three people and then there are 50 citizens. Anybody who is interested, you can apply to the B president and get on and if you're been to some meetings and you have an interest in putting some time into the neighborhood, you'll learn a lot. But there's a lot of data there. Um, you know, the street lights go out, the road needs paving, um, the applications for zoning, the applications for enclosed and unenced sidewalk cafes, and I could go on and on. at the same time and those often are either dealt with locally, passed on locally, but certainly have a knowledge locally. You even have situations where the movie people come in and if you're on the west side, everybody hates them even though they're great for the economy. How many of those permits are let on any given moment in Manhattan? Because we always want them to go to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Please go somewhere else. But you know, that kind of information would be so helpful to regular New Yorkers. why am I getting all the movies and I can't get a parking space? You know, that's the kind of thing that people really actually want to know. but the community boards are not in real time with 311. So you call 311 and the community board doesn't know it. So, we're trying to think of ways that community boards which are run by city employees can in fact have that real-time data because often this is an example of the importance of this data sharing because the community boards would like to know have a 100 people called about the street light or am I the only am I only getting one complaint or is are 100 people complaining about a road that's not paved or am I the only is the only complaint coming from me because if there are of people calling then we'd like to be more active in trying to solve the problem. So there's also something called scout. These people in the city I've never actually seen them. They run around little golf carts and they find problems but they don't share them in real time with the community boards. They give the data in centrally. So I'm giving you some examples of some of this huge data opportunity that's out there and that we'd like to capture with intro 29 in 2010. So, I I'm going to stop there. We can certainly talk about it later. I would love if people have the time to either write to the mayor or to Speaker Quinn to say that you'd like to have intro 29 of 2010, you can send an email passed in some form because you think that having government data be public is a good thing. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for coming. I just want to make sure that you want to take one or two questions if you have one. I think it's interesting that you characterize the police department as being behind this sort of stuff because the public perception is that internally like blockby crime data and predictive analysis they're actually cutting edge on this. Yeah, I I wasn't correct. They're not behind. They won't share it. That's the problem. In other words, they're very the comat is excellent. obviously they're doing a great job on terrorism. So now they have 1,000 police officers as we're sitting here on computers. So that could be everything from comat to looking at porno and dealing with those crazy people. Porno meaning not them but making sure that others are not doing it. Cutting and also looking at the issue of terrorism 1,000 officers. That's a lot of people. So, no, they're very and they have NYC win, which of course is the system that I didn't talk about, which is a citywide a first responder system wireless, and they're able now in the near future to have much more connectivity and instant real-time info in the cars. But they're the only problem is they don't like to share anything. That's the little problem.</div></td></tr>
</table>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6644&oldid=prevMarco at 13:48, 17 April 20262026-04-17T13:48:17Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 13:48, 17 April 2026</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And that intern has to gather all the material that the upset person or journalist is interested in and supposedly gets back to you in a certain time period, but you can always get an extension. So it's my just one example and it's very timeconuming because you got 80 city agencies often corporation council has to get involved if it's a more high level request and of course what is responded to and what's blacked out is obviouslyimportant. Um, so the fact of the matter is that I think that if you have a lot of this data up on the web in a format that people can understand that you will not get as many foils and you won't have to be answering all of these endless and sometimes important and sometimes there'll still be foils, but it's a cost-saving measure and I want to add that because people those of us who just want the data out there to be able to work on it and use it practically and to help save lives and make people's lives earlier here don't see it also as a cost-saving measure. So I think that's extremely extremely important. the other thing I want to mention is that there is you know there's a lot of interest in this legislation. Obviously people in the public sector who are writing about what the city is or isn't doing or interested in it. people from like Common Cause and the groups that work on Citizens Union and groups that work on public access have testified over and over in support. and I think what comes up again and again is what kind of format that the data has to be in. And that's something that some of you in the room might have some good ideas about and certainly something that the city is trying to take note of. That is definitely part of intro 29 of 2010 is having data that's in an accessible format. the other issue I think is you know how do you how does the city decide and how do we advocate to know which agencies will produce and which not it's always challenging with the police department. and I obviously were concerned about health records. Something that just sort of an aside some of you may have seen checkbook NYC. It was just put up a couple July 1st by controller John Louu and Checkbook NYC is an amazing amount of data. Not something that you need to manipulate at all, but it is every penny that the city spends every day. It's updated daily. It's about 35 billion that's up there now out of a budget of 35 billion. But this is about 35 billion. And it has you can search, you know, it says that the department of health has spent money on pharmaceuticals and doctors and pediatricians and that the mayor's office has bought liquor, but they're going to get reimbured for a party. And it says how many car services the board of elections has used when the workers go home late, etc., etc. For those of us who interested in gossip and, you know, things like that, it's fabulous. So for those of you who are interested in more mundane things like tech and things that a little bit more professional, it's also there. what's not there because they're working at it is the salaries of the workers in a because there's a lot of concern about that kind of privatization and they're worried about whether people would be stocked or home at home home names if that kind of thing is still not up there and it will be. But I all I I mention that first of all it's a fun site. You should look at it. But I also mention that because I think the city is finally getting the message that data that's public needs to be public. And so one part of it is where does the city spend their money?</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And that intern has to gather all the material that the upset person or journalist is interested in and supposedly gets back to you in a certain time period, but you can always get an extension. So it's my just one example and it's very timeconuming because you got 80 city agencies often corporation council has to get involved if it's a more high level request and of course what is responded to and what's blacked out is obviouslyimportant. Um, so the fact of the matter is that I think that if you have a lot of this data up on the web in a format that people can understand that you will not get as many foils and you won't have to be answering all of these endless and sometimes important and sometimes there'll still be foils, but it's a cost-saving measure and I want to add that because people those of us who just want the data out there to be able to work on it and use it practically and to help save lives and make people's lives earlier here don't see it also as a cost-saving measure. So I think that's extremely extremely important. the other thing I want to mention is that there is you know there's a lot of interest in this legislation. Obviously people in the public sector who are writing about what the city is or isn't doing or interested in it. people from like Common Cause and the groups that work on Citizens Union and groups that work on public access have testified over and over in support. and I think what comes up again and again is what kind of format that the data has to be in. And that's something that some of you in the room might have some good ideas about and certainly something that the city is trying to take note of. That is definitely part of intro 29 of 2010 is having data that's in an accessible format. the other issue I think is you know how do you how does the city decide and how do we advocate to know which agencies will produce and which not it's always challenging with the police department. and I obviously were concerned about health records. Something that just sort of an aside some of you may have seen checkbook NYC. It was just put up a couple July 1st by controller John Louu and Checkbook NYC is an amazing amount of data. Not something that you need to manipulate at all, but it is every penny that the city spends every day. It's updated daily. It's about 35 billion that's up there now out of a budget of 35 billion. But this is about 35 billion. And it has you can search, you know, it says that the department of health has spent money on pharmaceuticals and doctors and pediatricians and that the mayor's office has bought liquor, but they're going to get reimbured for a party. And it says how many car services the board of elections has used when the workers go home late, etc., etc. For those of us who interested in gossip and, you know, things like that, it's fabulous. So for those of you who are interested in more mundane things like tech and things that a little bit more professional, it's also there. what's not there because they're working at it is the salaries of the workers in a because there's a lot of concern about that kind of privatization and they're worried about whether people would be stocked or home at home home names if that kind of thing is still not up there and it will be. But I all I I mention that first of all it's a fun site. You should look at it. But I also mention that because I think the city is finally getting the message that data that's public needs to be public. And so one part of it is where does the city spend their money?</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Where does your tax money go? And already just the other day somebody did a story about car washing because it turns out the Daily News must have seen a police car being washed. I don't know how the reporter started on the story, but then he realized that there are like 10 different agencies and it's a hodgepodge of which government car is washed at which car wash. And then unfortunately somebody got a car wash for like $126 or something that's very expensive car wash. And so from there it was a story, but he got all of his information from putting the word car wash or some something like that into checkbook NYC. Um, so that's good for the public to know and hopefully we'll have some hearings and maybe there'll be vendor car washing in terms of the value for the dollar. But this particular legislation is is larger in the sense that it is looking at the data sets that you as people who know how to academics and your jobs figure out how you can take this data and make it useful to the public and that will never get done by government. Um, and so it's absolutely necessary. It's your data. It's your right to have that data. But at the same time, in this in today's world, what I think is so exciting about it, it can create jobs and it can create information and hopefully make people's lives better. So on so many different levels, this is a very exciting opportunity. how we get to that point is what we're advocating for as much as possible. and then just finally, you know, there's so many questions that</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Where does your tax money go? And already just the other day somebody did a story about car washing because it turns out the Daily News must have seen a police car being washed. I don't know how the reporter started on the story, but then he realized that there are like 10 different agencies and it's a hodgepodge of which government car is washed at which car wash. And then unfortunately somebody got a car wash for like $126 or something that's very expensive car wash. And so from there it was a story, but he got all of his information from putting the word car wash or some something like that into checkbook NYC. Um, so that's good for the public to know and hopefully we'll have some hearings and maybe there'll be vendor car washing in terms of the value for the dollar. But this particular legislation is is larger in the sense that it is looking at the data sets that you as people who know how to academics and your jobs figure out how you can take this data and make it useful to the public and that will never get done by government. Um, and so it's absolutely necessary. It's your data. It's your right to have that data. But at the same time, in this in today's world, what I think is so exciting about it, it can create jobs and it can create information and hopefully make people's lives better. So on so many different levels, this is a very exciting opportunity. how we get to that point is what we're advocating for as much as possible. and then just finally, you know, there's so many questions that have to be answered. What's the record policy? How long do you keep the data for? Um, we're already running into some of those questions even without a large large amount available to the public. What are the technical standards? Um, is it based on agencies or is it across the board in terms of the standards? Is it one data portal, XML, raw data, support, RSS? Um, and you know, just something that's readable. And then of course I would be a big believer particularly in the nonprofit sector, you'd actually have to have some classes and some training. I think for some of the nonprofit sector people who could really use this data to be able to use it more effectively. I think that the Washington DC apps for democracy, some of you may know that has done has actually saved money and is doing the kind of work that we would like to see done in New York. A lot of times the</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>have to be answered. What's the record policy? How long do you keep the data for? Um, we're already running into some of those questions even without a large large amount available to the public. What are the technical standards? Um, is it based on agencies or is it across the board in terms of the standards? Is it one data portal, XML, raw data, support, RSS? Um, and you know, just something that's readable. And then of course I would be a big believer particularly in the nonprofit sector, you'd actually have to have some classes and some training. I think for some of the nonprofit sector people who could really use this data to be able to use it more effectively. I think that the Washington DC apps for democracy, some of you may know that has done has actually saved money and is doing the kind of work that we would like to see done in New York. A lot of times the</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> updating is a problem. If you ever go to a government website, you will find at least in some cases, it's not updated as often as some of the ones in the private sector because there's obviously a perhaps a bigger motive to try to get the private sector ones updated. I find I always tell my staff, don't rely just on the web. You got to pick up the phone to get the real data because it's not necessarily going to be correct. We had a big challenge even with the 311 data. Um, the community boards. Has anybody ever been to a community board meeting? I hope somebody like three people have been to Oh, four have been to a community board meeting. I I' I've probably been to 5,000 community board meetings. So, just to give you an example of the challenging of of elected office, but there are 59 community boards in New York City. And for those of you not from New York, they're like little little city halls.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> updating is a problem. If you ever go to a government website, you will find at least in some cases, it's not updated as often as some of the ones in the private sector because there's obviously a perhaps a bigger motive to try to get the private sector ones updated. I find I always tell my staff, don't rely just on the web. You got to pick up the phone to get the real data because it's not necessarily going to be correct. We had a big challenge even with the 311 data. Um, the community boards. Has anybody ever been to a community board meeting? I hope somebody like three people have been to Oh, four have been to a community board meeting. I I' I've probably been to 5,000 community board meetings. So, just to give you an example of the challenging of of elected office, but there are 59 community boards in New York City. And for those of you not from New York,</div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>they're like little little city halls.</div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There's a staff of about three people and then there are 50 citizens. Anybody who is interested, you can apply to the B president and get on and if you're been to some meetings and you have an interest in putting some time into the neighborhood, you'll learn a lot. But there's a lot of data there. Um, you know, the street lights go out, the road needs paving, um, the applications for zoning, the applications for enclosed and unenced sidewalk cafes, and I could go on and on. at the same time and those often are either dealt with locally, passed on locally, but certainly have a knowledge locally. You even have situations where the movie people come in and if you're on the west side, everybody hates them even though they're great for the economy. How many of those permits are let on any given moment in Manhattan? Because we always want them to go to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Please go somewhere else. But you know, that kind of information would be so helpful to regular New Yorkers. why am I getting all the movies and I can't get a parking space? You know, that's the kind of thing that people really actually want to know. but the community boards are not in real time with 311. So you call 311 and the community board doesn't know it. So, we're trying to think of ways that community boards which are run by city employees can in fact have that real-time data because often this is an example of the importance of this data sharing because the community boards would like to know have a 100 people called about the street light or am I the only am I only getting one complaint or is are 100 people complaining about a road that's not paved or am I the only is the only complaint coming from me because if there are of people calling then we'd like to be more active in trying to solve the problem. So there's also something called scout. These people in the city I've never actually seen them. They run around little golf carts and they find problems but they don't share them in real time with the community boards. They give the data in centrally. So I'm giving you some examples of some of this huge data opportunity that's out there and that we'd like to capture with intro 29 in 2010. So, I I'm going to stop there. We can certainly talk about it later. I would love if people have the time to either write to the mayor or to Speaker Quinn to say that you'd like to have intro 29 of 2010, you can send an email passed in some form because you think that having government data be public is a good thing. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for coming. I just want to make sure that you want to take one or two questions if you have one. I think it's interesting that you characterize the police department as being behind this sort of stuff because the public perception is that internally like blockby crime data and predictive analysis they're actually cutting edge on this. Yeah, I I wasn't correct. They're not behind. They won't share it. That's the problem. In other words, they're very the comat is excellent. obviously they're doing a great job on terrorism. So now they have 1,000 police officers as we're sitting here on computers. So that could be everything from comat to looking at porno and dealing with those crazy people. Porno meaning not them but making sure that others are not doing it. Cutting and also looking at the issue of terrorism 1,000 officers. That's a lot of people. So, no, they're very and they have NYC win, which of course is the system that I didn't talk about, which is a citywide a first responder system wireless, and they're able now in the near future to have much more connectivity and instant real-time info in the cars. But they're the only problem is they don't like to share anything. That's the little problem.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There's a staff of about three people and then there are 50 citizens. Anybody who is interested, you can apply to the B president and get on and if you're been to some meetings and you have an interest in putting some time into the neighborhood, you'll learn a lot. But there's a lot of data there. Um, you know, the street lights go out, the road needs paving, um, the applications for zoning, the applications for enclosed and unenced sidewalk cafes, and I could go on and on. at the same time and those often are either dealt with locally, passed on locally, but certainly have a knowledge locally. You even have situations where the movie people come in and if you're on the west side, everybody hates them even though they're great for the economy. How many of those permits are let on any given moment in Manhattan? Because we always want them to go to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Please go somewhere else. But you know, that kind of information would be so helpful to regular New Yorkers. why am I getting all the movies and I can't get a parking space? You know, that's the kind of thing that people really actually want to know. but the community boards are not in real time with 311. So you call 311 and the community board doesn't know it. So, we're trying to think of ways that community boards which are run by city employees can in fact have that real-time data because often this is an example of the importance of this data sharing because the community boards would like to know have a 100 people called about the street light or am I the only am I only getting one complaint or is are 100 people complaining about a road that's not paved or am I the only is the only complaint coming from me because if there are of people calling then we'd like to be more active in trying to solve the problem. So there's also something called scout. These people in the city I've never actually seen them. They run around little golf carts and they find problems but they don't share them in real time with the community boards. They give the data in centrally. So I'm giving you some examples of some of this huge data opportunity that's out there and that we'd like to capture with intro 29 in 2010. So, I I'm going to stop there. We can certainly talk about it later. I would love if people have the time to either write to the mayor or to Speaker Quinn to say that you'd like to have intro 29 of 2010, you can send an email passed in some form because you think that having government data be public is a good thing. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for coming. I just want to make sure that you want to take one or two questions if you have one. I think it's interesting that you characterize the police department as being behind this sort of stuff because the public perception is that internally like blockby crime data and predictive analysis they're actually cutting edge on this. Yeah, I I wasn't correct. They're not behind. They won't share it. That's the problem. In other words, they're very the comat is excellent. obviously they're doing a great job on terrorism. So now they have 1,000 police officers as we're sitting here on computers. So that could be everything from comat to looking at porno and dealing with those crazy people. Porno meaning not them but making sure that others are not doing it. Cutting and also looking at the issue of terrorism 1,000 officers. That's a lot of people. So, no, they're very and they have NYC win, which of course is the system that I didn't talk about, which is a citywide a first responder system wireless, and they're able now in the near future to have much more connectivity and instant real-time info in the cars. But they're the only problem is they don't like to share anything. That's the little problem.</div></td></tr>
</table>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6643&oldid=prevMarco at 13:47, 17 April 20262026-04-17T13:47:57Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 13:47, 17 April 2026</td>
</tr><tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-lineno" id="mw-diff-left-l19">Line 19:</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> they're like little little city halls.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> they're like little little city halls.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There's a staff of about three people and then there are 50 citizens. Anybody who is interested, you can apply to the B president and get on and if you're been to some meetings and you have an interest in putting some time into the neighborhood, you'll learn a lot. But there's a lot of data there. Um, you know, the street lights go out, the road needs paving, um, the applications for zoning, the applications for enclosed and unenced sidewalk cafes, and I could go on and on. at the same time and those often are either dealt with locally, passed on locally, but certainly have a knowledge locally. You even have situations where the movie people come in and if you're on the west side, everybody hates them even though they're great for the economy. How many of those permits are let on any given moment in Manhattan? Because we always want them to go to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Please go somewhere else. But you know, that kind of information would be so helpful to regular New Yorkers. why am I getting all the movies and I can't get a parking space? You know, that's the kind of thing that people really actually want to know. but the community boards are not in real time with 311. So you call 311 and the community board doesn't know it. So, we're trying to think of ways that community boards which are run by city employees can in fact have that real-time data because often this is an example of the importance of this data sharing because the community boards would like to know have a 100 people called about the street light or am I the only am I only getting one complaint or is are 100 people complaining about a road that's not paved or am I the only is the only complaint coming from me because if there are of people calling then we'd like to be more active in trying to solve the problem. So there's also something called scout. These people in the city I've never actually seen them. They run around little golf carts and they find problems but they don't share them in real time with the community boards. They give the data in centrally. So I'm giving you some examples of some of this huge data opportunity that's out there and that we'd like to capture with intro 29 in 2010. So, I I'm going to stop there. We can certainly talk about it later. I would love if people have the time to either write to the mayor or to Speaker Quinn to say that you'd like to have intro 29 of 2010, you can send an email passed in some form because you think that having government data be public is a good thing. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for coming. I just want to make sure that you want to take one or two questions if you have one. I think it's interesting that you characterize the police department as being behind this sort of stuff because the public perception is that internally like blockby crime data and predictive analysis they're actually cutting edge on this. Yeah, I I wasn't correct. They're not behind. They won't share it. That's the problem. In other words, they're very the comat is excellent. obviously they're doing a great job on terrorism. So now they have 1,000 police officers as we're sitting here on computers. So that could be everything from comat to looking at porno and dealing with those crazy people. Porno meaning not them but making sure that others are not doing it. Cutting and also looking at the issue of terrorism 1,000 officers. That's a lot of people. So, no, they're very and they have NYC win, which of course is the system that I didn't talk about, which is a citywide a first responder system wireless, and they're able now in the near future to have much more connectivity and instant real-time info in the cars. But they're the only</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There's a staff of about three people and then there are 50 citizens. Anybody who is interested, you can apply to the B president and get on and if you're been to some meetings and you have an interest in putting some time into the neighborhood, you'll learn a lot. But there's a lot of data there. Um, you know, the street lights go out, the road needs paving, um, the applications for zoning, the applications for enclosed and unenced sidewalk cafes, and I could go on and on. at the same time and those often are either dealt with locally, passed on locally, but certainly have a knowledge locally. You even have situations where the movie people come in and if you're on the west side, everybody hates them even though they're great for the economy. How many of those permits are let on any given moment in Manhattan? Because we always want them to go to the Bronx or Brooklyn. Please go somewhere else. But you know, that kind of information would be so helpful to regular New Yorkers. why am I getting all the movies and I can't get a parking space? You know, that's the kind of thing that people really actually want to know. but the community boards are not in real time with 311. So you call 311 and the community board doesn't know it. So, we're trying to think of ways that community boards which are run by city employees can in fact have that real-time data because often this is an example of the importance of this data sharing because the community boards would like to know have a 100 people called about the street light or am I the only am I only getting one complaint or is are 100 people complaining about a road that's not paved or am I the only is the only complaint coming from me because if there are of people calling then we'd like to be more active in trying to solve the problem. So there's also something called scout. These people in the city I've never actually seen them. They run around little golf carts and they find problems but they don't share them in real time with the community boards. They give the data in centrally. So I'm giving you some examples of some of this huge data opportunity that's out there and that we'd like to capture with intro 29 in 2010. So, I I'm going to stop there. We can certainly talk about it later. I would love if people have the time to either write to the mayor or to Speaker Quinn to say that you'd like to have intro 29 of 2010, you can send an email passed in some form because you think that having government data be public is a good thing. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for coming. I just want to make sure that you want to take one or two questions if you have one. I think it's interesting that you characterize the police department as being behind this sort of stuff because the public perception is that internally like blockby crime data and predictive analysis they're actually cutting edge on this. Yeah, I I wasn't correct. They're not behind. They won't share it. That's the problem. In other words, they're very the comat is excellent. obviously they're doing a great job on terrorism. So now they have 1,000 police officers as we're sitting here on computers. So that could be everything from comat to looking at porno and dealing with those crazy people. Porno meaning not them but making sure that others are not doing it. Cutting and also looking at the issue of terrorism 1,000 officers. That's a lot of people. So, no, they're very and they have NYC win, which of course is the system that I didn't talk about, which is a citywide a first responder system wireless, and they're able now in the near future to have much more connectivity and instant real-time info in the cars. But they're the only problem is they don't like to share anything. That's the little problem.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>problem is they don't like to share anything. That's the little problem.</div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Marco Neumann:</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Marco Neumann:</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>All right. So, with that, we are heading over to Jim. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. There's so much work to do. So, um, when is the next meeting? I will let you know then. I don't know if it's been set because we're starting a new session during the fall, but we'll let you know and then you can circle. Yes, we can. So, we're switching the screen. So, we have a maybe Evan Sandhaus, you want to say a few words about September 30th or you want me to do that now, right? I'll come second.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>All right. So, with that, we are heading over to Jim. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. There's so much work to do. So, um, when is the next meeting? I will let you know then. I don't know if it's been set because we're starting a new session during the fall, but we'll let you know and then you can circle. Yes, we can. So, we're switching the screen. So, we have a maybe Evan Sandhaus, you want to say a few words about September 30th or you want me to do that now, right? I'll come second.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>Evan Sandhaus</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Evan Sandhaus<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">:</ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I'm Evan Sandhaus. I am the I'm I'm one of three assistant organizers of the semantic web meetup along with Marco and I am we're going to do a pretty cool event this coming this the first public announcement of it the meetup page isn't out there yet but on September 30th we're going to do a session in jointly with a new meetup called Hacks and Hackers. I don't know if any of you have heard of them or not. They're a they're a new meet up focused on the intersection of journalism and technology. the journalists are the hacks. We're the hackers. so it's called hacks and hackers. and we're going to do a joint session with them on the role of data and metadata in the collection and in the production and management of news. So we're going to have we're going to have speakers from right now could change but right now we have the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Hurst and AOL News lined up to speak and it's going to be a really really cool event. And I pretty sure we have a sponsor that's going to pay for drinks, too. So, it's going to be it's going to I if for no other reason than that, I I I hope you guys feel like this is going to be interesting. the announcement will go up on Meetup shortly as soon as I can get around to writing the description of the event. So, I hope to see you all there and should be good. Where is this going to be? All right. So, it's going to be at AOL's at at an AOL facility. I don't know exact. It's here in New York. We'll hear more about this.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>I'm Evan Sandhaus. I am the I'm I'm one of three assistant organizers of the semantic web meetup along with Marco and I am we're going to do a pretty cool event this coming this the first public announcement of it the meetup page isn't out there yet but on September 30th we're going to do a session in jointly with a new meetup called Hacks and Hackers. I don't know if any of you have heard of them or not. They're a they're a new meet up focused on the intersection of journalism and technology. the journalists are the hacks. We're the hackers. so it's called hacks and hackers. and we're going to do a joint session with them on the role of data and metadata in the collection and in the production and management of news. So we're going to have we're going to have speakers from right now could change but right now we have the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Hurst and AOL News lined up to speak and it's going to be a really really cool event. And I pretty sure we have a sponsor that's going to pay for drinks, too. So, it's going to be it's going to I if for no other reason than that, I I I hope you guys feel like this is going to be interesting. the announcement will go up on Meetup shortly as soon as I can get around to writing the description of the event. So, I hope to see you all there and should be good. Where is this going to be? All right. So, it's going to be at AOL's at at an AOL facility. I don't know exact. It's here in New York. We'll hear more about this.</div></td></tr>
</table>Marcohttps://www.lotico.com/index.php?title=Data_Gov_Transcript&diff=6642&oldid=prevMarco at 13:47, 17 April 20262026-04-17T13:47:36Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 13:47, 17 April 2026</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>But I've always believed in this idea of public information should be public and when I came into the council I was head of made head of the u at that point it was a subcommittee on technology and then for the next eight years it was one of the 40 city council committees. There are actually 51 members of the city council for those of you who don't have the pleasure of spending all your time in city hall. there are 51 members and the budget of the city now is now 63 billion. There are about 303,000 employees. It's the fourth largest budget in the United States. United States budget is bigger. State of California, state of New York, and then New York City. So it's bigger than Massachusetts and Cal and Texas and Florida and so on. So it's really like a and half the countries of the world were bigger than half the countries of the world. So technology plays a role. Needless to say, I think government is always slower. You know that from those of you who either work for government or work with government or try to get information. So for the last eight years, we've been holding hearings when really nobody had ever had hearings on technology in government before. We had hearings right after 911 about how technology helped as much as was possible in that horrific situation in the aftermath tracking and Verizon got back up pretty quickly and all the things that 9/11 had to deal with and all we've had hearings on of course the maps and we've had hearings on clouds and we've had hearings on spectrum and we've had hearings on the everything the franchises with Verizon and the cables. I mean there's no topic we haven't kind of looked at but the one that and broadband we brought passed a bill that said that we had to have hearings in all five buraus to see whether there was or was not accessible lowcost broadband in the five buraus and of course there's lots of it but it's expensive and not very fast and so it's sort of like a a a mish mash of different topics, but the one that is always hiding I think a little bit is the data. there is in the city anybody here work for the city of New York? Are there people besides So there's a couple of us couple of us. the city of New York does have a very vibrant I guess it's a closed meeting but I go fairly regularly and it's all of the CIOS in the different agencies who meet on a regular basis and it really amazing I think because these are the men and women who have to make things work for this huge city and you know they're they're under represented in the you know newspapers on the positive note every day. But there I don't know how many we have 80 city agencies probably more but the official ones are 80 and so there's probably there's obviously many people and this group comes together I think it's called the municipal data council and they come together with the commissioner of do it and other agencies on a regular basis to talk about what their issues are and what their challenges are and how they can work together and how things aren't working and so on and there's a big push now to try to make more centralized because the agencies police departments the worst but don't tell anybody I said that they're very siloed you know they want to do everything in their own little world and I'm sure that's true in academia but it's really true with city agencies so given that whole backdrop and based on other cities we're always looking New York City thinks we know everything but we do try to think particularly on the tech front are there other cities that are doing interesting things and I think on the issue of open data No, that's true. Now, the mayor, uh, Bloomberg did, as you know, a couple of times, at least once, and I think there's another one coming up, and some of you may have participated, um, you know, had an apps conference. I went to the opening, uh, of one, and it was it was exciting. The only problem for me, and I'm just going to speak for myself, was it was all based on parking spots and I don't know, God, things that, you know, they're important, but I'm interested in how you can help New Yorkers. Maybe getting the parking as part of parking. But anyway, the issue was the data that was available was only those that either the city thought was easily lowhanging fruit or one that u somebody who was doing the apps had requested. Now if you don't it's like anything else if you don't know the data is there how are you going to request it? So it was it's a very small subset of all the data that's available. So we introduced a bill that said that the data has to be available.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>But I've always believed in this idea of public information should be public and when I came into the council I was head of made head of the u at that point it was a subcommittee on technology and then for the next eight years it was one of the 40 city council committees. There are actually 51 members of the city council for those of you who don't have the pleasure of spending all your time in city hall. there are 51 members and the budget of the city now is now 63 billion. There are about 303,000 employees. It's the fourth largest budget in the United States. United States budget is bigger. State of California, state of New York, and then New York City. So it's bigger than Massachusetts and Cal and Texas and Florida and so on. So it's really like a and half the countries of the world were bigger than half the countries of the world. So technology plays a role. Needless to say, I think government is always slower. You know that from those of you who either work for government or work with government or try to get information. So for the last eight years, we've been holding hearings when really nobody had ever had hearings on technology in government before. We had hearings right after 911 about how technology helped as much as was possible in that horrific situation in the aftermath tracking and Verizon got back up pretty quickly and all the things that 9/11 had to deal with and all we've had hearings on of course the maps and we've had hearings on clouds and we've had hearings on spectrum and we've had hearings on the everything the franchises with Verizon and the cables. I mean there's no topic we haven't kind of looked at but the one that and broadband we brought passed a bill that said that we had to have hearings in all five buraus to see whether there was or was not accessible lowcost broadband in the five buraus and of course there's lots of it but it's expensive and not very fast and so it's sort of like a a a mish mash of different topics, but the one that is always hiding I think a little bit is the data. there is in the city anybody here work for the city of New York? Are there people besides So there's a couple of us couple of us. the city of New York does have a very vibrant I guess it's a closed meeting but I go fairly regularly and it's all of the CIOS in the different agencies who meet on a regular basis and it really amazing I think because these are the men and women who have to make things work for this huge city and you know they're they're under represented in the you know newspapers on the positive note every day. But there I don't know how many we have 80 city agencies probably more but the official ones are 80 and so there's probably there's obviously many people and this group comes together I think it's called the municipal data council and they come together with the commissioner of do it and other agencies on a regular basis to talk about what their issues are and what their challenges are and how they can work together and how things aren't working and so on and there's a big push now to try to make more centralized because the agencies police departments the worst but don't tell anybody I said that they're very siloed you know they want to do everything in their own little world and I'm sure that's true in academia but it's really true with city agencies so given that whole backdrop and based on other cities we're always looking New York City thinks we know everything but we do try to think particularly on the tech front are there other cities that are doing interesting things and I think on the issue of open data No, that's true. Now, the mayor, uh, Bloomberg did, as you know, a couple of times, at least once, and I think there's another one coming up, and some of you may have participated, um, you know, had an apps conference. I went to the opening, uh, of one, and it was it was exciting. The only problem for me, and I'm just going to speak for myself, was it was all based on parking spots and I don't know, God, things that, you know, they're important, but I'm interested in how you can help New Yorkers. Maybe getting the parking as part of parking. But anyway, the issue was the data that was available was only those that either the city thought was easily lowhanging fruit or one that u somebody who was doing the apps had requested. Now if you don't it's like anything else if you don't know the data is there how are you going to request it? So it was it's a very small subset of all the data that's available. So we introduced a bill that said that the data has to be available.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>We did it in 2009 and we did it again when we started a new session in 2010. So now we're actually had a hearing in June this of this past June and the issue is whether we can pass intro 29 of 2010. And what this legislation says is that the city of New York needs to make its data available in a format that is accessible to the general public, not in some formula that nobody can understand, even with the apps. And some of you may have won the contest or participated in the contest. You had to be one of you in the room to understand how to make it something that the public could understand. So we I obviously my background is human services and housing and things like that. So I want something that people working in the nonprofit sector can use to figure out where's the affordable housing how many homeless do we really have and what are their needs and so on and so forth. So at this moment just to give you an update and I can go through the bill in a minute but at this moment we've had a couple of meetings with the new commissioner Carol Post. she came from the office of operations. She's been there, I think, since December of last year, and she did say in her opening statement to the city council that she wants this bill to pass. Now, of course, you always hear that and you want to make sure that it's this bill or something that's much too narrow, in which case it's not this bill, but to her credit, she has had meeting with us, meaning the city council, and she has met with all of the so maybe 80 or fewer agencies, but all the agencies, and she's giving them time, a little bit of time, not much, this fall to meet goals or to come up with goals. so they can have open data. And the idea there would be she's got certain criteria that they have to meet and the agencies have deadlines. and when we're going to meet again, I think it's either the end of September or the beginning of October to figure out uh which agencies are meeting their goals and their timelines and which are not. Now, there are some agencies, and you probably know this, when you call 311, has anybody ever called 311? You probably Okay, good. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But it is generally u an amazing talk about databases that is an amazing database. but those sometimes the agency can quickly respond and sometimes it's a legacy system and it has to go through a whole bunch of channels before a you get an answer but b you get data. So she's dealing with some agencies that have some very old hardware and is not compatible with anything that's helpful. So she's trying to figure out how to make this data accessible in the broadest format. And of course we're pushing very very hard. Secondly, costsaving. Anything that saves money in today's world is a good thing. If you haven't foiled freedom of information law, you may be the only New Yorkers who've never foiled because many, many New Yorkers file. Reporters file, journalists file, upset New Yorkers file. Um, I used to work in a city agency that was always getting foiled.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>We did it in 2009 and we did it again when we started a new session in 2010. So now we're actually had a hearing in June this of this past June and the issue is whether we can pass intro 29 of 2010. And what this legislation says is that the city of New York needs to make its data available in a format that is accessible to the general public, not in some formula that nobody can understand, even with the apps. And some of you may have won the contest or participated in the contest. You had to be one of you in the room to understand how to make it something that the public could understand. So we I obviously my background is human services and housing and things like that. So I want something that people working in the nonprofit sector can use to figure out where's the affordable housing how many homeless do we really have and what are their needs and so on and so forth. So at this moment just to give you an update and I can go through the bill in a minute but at this moment we've had a couple of meetings with the new commissioner Carol Post. she came from the office of operations. She's been there, I think, since December of last year, and she did say in her opening statement to the city council that she wants this bill to pass. Now, of course, you always hear that and you want to make sure that it's this bill or something that's much too narrow, in which case it's not this bill, but to her credit, she has had meeting with us, meaning the city council, and she has met with all of the so maybe 80 or fewer agencies, but all the agencies, and she's giving them time, a little bit of time, not much, this fall to meet goals or to come up with goals. so they can have open data. And the idea there would be she's got certain criteria that they have to meet and the agencies have deadlines. and when we're going to meet again, I think it's either the end of September or the beginning of October to figure out uh which agencies are meeting their goals and their timelines and which are not. Now, there are some agencies, and you probably know this, when you call 311, has anybody ever called 311? You probably Okay, good. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But it is generally u an amazing talk about databases that is an amazing database. but those sometimes the agency can quickly respond and sometimes it's a legacy system and it has to go through a whole bunch of channels before a you get an answer but b you get data. So she's dealing with some agencies that have some very old hardware and is not compatible with anything that's helpful. So she's trying to figure out how to make this data accessible in the broadest format. And of course we're pushing very very hard. Secondly, costsaving. Anything that saves money in today's world is a good thing. If you haven't foiled freedom of information law, you may be the only New Yorkers who've never foiled because many, many New Yorkers file. Reporters file, journalists file, upset New Yorkers file. Um, I used to work in a city agency that was always getting foiled. And that is a very timeconsuming response because often it's given to be honest with you to a low-level intern.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"> </del>And that is a very timeconsuming response because often it's given to be honest with you to a low-level intern.</div></td><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-added"></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And that intern has to gather all the material that the upset person or journalist is interested in and supposedly gets back to you in a certain time period, but you can always get an extension. So it's my just one example and it's very timeconuming because you got 80 city agencies often corporation council has to get involved if it's a more high level request and of course what is responded to and what's blacked out is obviouslyimportant. Um, so the fact of the matter is that I think that if you have a lot of this data up on the web in a format that people can understand that you will not get as many foils and you won't have to be answering all of these endless and sometimes important and sometimes there'll still be foils, but it's a cost-saving measure and I want to add that because people those of us who just want the data out there to be able to work on it and use it practically and to help save lives and make people's lives earlier here don't see it also as a cost-saving measure. So I think that's extremely extremely important. the other thing I want to mention is that there is you know there's a lot of interest in this legislation. Obviously people in the public sector who are writing about what the city is or isn't doing or interested in it. people from like Common Cause and the groups that work on Citizens Union and groups that work on public access have testified over and over in support. and I think what comes up again and again is what kind of format that the data has to be in. And that's something that some of you in the room might have some good ideas about and certainly something that the city is trying to take note of. That is definitely part of intro 29 of 2010 is having data that's in an accessible format. the other issue I think is you know how do you how does the city decide and how do we advocate to know which agencies will produce and which not it's always challenging with the police department. and I obviously were concerned about health records. Something that just sort of an aside some of you may have seen checkbook NYC. It was just put up a couple July 1st by controller John Louu and Checkbook NYC is an amazing amount of data. Not something that you need to manipulate at all, but it is every penny that the city spends every day. It's updated daily. It's about 35 billion that's up there now out of a budget of 35 billion. But this is about 35 billion. And it has you can search, you know, it says that the department of health has spent money on pharmaceuticals and doctors and pediatricians and that the mayor's office has bought liquor, but they're going to get reimbured for a party. And it says how many car services the board of elections has used when the workers go home late, etc., etc. For those of us who interested in gossip and, you know, things like that, it's fabulous. So for those of you who are interested in more mundane things like tech and things that a little bit more professional, it's also there. what's not there because they're working at it is the salaries of the workers in a because there's a lot of concern about that kind of privatization and they're worried about whether people would be stocked or home at home home names if that kind of thing is still not up there and it will be. But I all I I mention that first of all it's a fun site. You should look at it. But I also mention that because I think the city is finally getting the message that data that's public needs to be public. And so one part of it is where does the city spend their money?</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>And that intern has to gather all the material that the upset person or journalist is interested in and supposedly gets back to you in a certain time period, but you can always get an extension. So it's my just one example and it's very timeconuming because you got 80 city agencies often corporation council has to get involved if it's a more high level request and of course what is responded to and what's blacked out is obviouslyimportant. Um, so the fact of the matter is that I think that if you have a lot of this data up on the web in a format that people can understand that you will not get as many foils and you won't have to be answering all of these endless and sometimes important and sometimes there'll still be foils, but it's a cost-saving measure and I want to add that because people those of us who just want the data out there to be able to work on it and use it practically and to help save lives and make people's lives earlier here don't see it also as a cost-saving measure. So I think that's extremely extremely important. the other thing I want to mention is that there is you know there's a lot of interest in this legislation. Obviously people in the public sector who are writing about what the city is or isn't doing or interested in it. people from like Common Cause and the groups that work on Citizens Union and groups that work on public access have testified over and over in support. and I think what comes up again and again is what kind of format that the data has to be in. And that's something that some of you in the room might have some good ideas about and certainly something that the city is trying to take note of. That is definitely part of intro 29 of 2010 is having data that's in an accessible format. the other issue I think is you know how do you how does the city decide and how do we advocate to know which agencies will produce and which not it's always challenging with the police department. and I obviously were concerned about health records. Something that just sort of an aside some of you may have seen checkbook NYC. It was just put up a couple July 1st by controller John Louu and Checkbook NYC is an amazing amount of data. Not something that you need to manipulate at all, but it is every penny that the city spends every day. It's updated daily. It's about 35 billion that's up there now out of a budget of 35 billion. But this is about 35 billion. And it has you can search, you know, it says that the department of health has spent money on pharmaceuticals and doctors and pediatricians and that the mayor's office has bought liquor, but they're going to get reimbured for a party. And it says how many car services the board of elections has used when the workers go home late, etc., etc. For those of us who interested in gossip and, you know, things like that, it's fabulous. So for those of you who are interested in more mundane things like tech and things that a little bit more professional, it's also there. what's not there because they're working at it is the salaries of the workers in a because there's a lot of concern about that kind of privatization and they're worried about whether people would be stocked or home at home home names if that kind of thing is still not up there and it will be. But I all I I mention that first of all it's a fun site. You should look at it. But I also mention that because I think the city is finally getting the message that data that's public needs to be public. And so one part of it is where does the city spend their money?</div></td></tr>
</table>Marco