Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
Engaging Civic-Minded Engineers to Reinvent nyc.gov
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
What do you get when you mix a city government that is prioritizing its digital presence with a homegrown, budding tech community?
Reinvent nyc.gov
, the City of New York’s first ever hackathon - an event where engineers meet to do collaborative programming. Held this past weekend at the entrepreneur campus
General Assembly
, the top prize at the hackathon was not money, but something even better: breakfast with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
To call redesigning nyc.gov a challenging task would be an understatement: Since its launch in 1996,
nyc.gov
has expanded from around 1,000 pages to over 500,000, covering every city agency and task force. The number of yearly visitors to City-run web pages (
33 million, or 24 million for nyc.gov
) is approaching that of visitors to Central Park (37 million), according to New York City’s Chief Digital Officer
Rachel Sterne
. Of course, over the course of 2 days, the goal was to generate ideas and prototypes for the redesign.
The event kicked off with welcomes from city officials who framed the event and gave a glimpse of the city’s digital future. Deputy Mayor for Operations for New York Steve Goldsmith said, “we want to be transparent in a usable way, and encourage collaborative decision making.”
As a tech partner, Google demoed developer tools for Maps, YouTube, and Android, and held office hours for the over 60 participants from New York to Kansas to California. As teams formed, a few of us also participated as designers and developers.
The Google team (from left to right): Ginny Hunt (Public Sector & Elections), Jeffrey Posnick (YouTube), Jenny Ye (Public Sector & Elections), Adam Koch (Android), Hilary Worden (google.org), Arnaud Sahuguet (google.org)
Less than 36 hours later,
submissions
were in, and the demos began. By and large, teams presented UIs that were search-centric, user-focused, and social. Some envisioned the new
nyc.gov
as not only making it easier to find information but also making it easier to connect with city officials and other New Yorkers. Participants also voiced their hopes for more machine-readable data and more APIs. After the judges deliberated, awards were presented in the categories of
Best Use of Local
,
Best Use of Social
,
Best User Interface
,
Most Innovative
, and
Judge’s Choice
. Moving forward, we hope that the New York City moves quickly in its redesign of
nyc.gov
and uses some of the new ideas produced this weekend.
Participants and judges gather for demos and awards (photo from NYC Digital)
Hackathons organized by cities are not a new phenomenon - earlier this month, Google Chicago hosted an
Apps for Metro hackathon
with the City of Chicago - but there’s much more that can be done. Rachel Sterne, who worked to put together Reinvent
nyc.gov
, wrote about the
advantages
of city-led hackathon efforts. Perhaps
NYC Digital
’s slogan - “technology in the public service” - sums it up bests: by opening up access to more interesting, real-time data and and making the public sector more participatory, governments will be able to tap into engineering resources of its citizens and build a sustainable community of civic hackers.
Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager,
google.org
and Jenny Ye, Public Sector & Elections Intern
No comments :
Post a Comment
Labels
2012
4 Screens to Victory
4STV
ads
advertising
case studies
caucuses
Civic Technology
Congress
data
debates
Digital Playbook
election results
Elections
engineering
events
Fellows
Florida
France
gadgets
Google AdWords
Google Elections
Google India. Know your candidates
Google trends
Google+
Google+ Hangouts
GOP
guest posts
hacking
Hangouts On Air
horserace
How do I vote?
India
Indonesia
iowa
Livestream
media partnerships
mobile
moderator
New Hampshire
New York
nyc
open
open data
OSCON
PDF
polling
President
research
South Carolina
Spanish. google.com/elections
State of the Union
surveys
trends
trendspotters
video
Voter Information Tool
voters
Voting
YouTube
YouTube for Government
Archive
2015
Nov
Oct
Jun
May
Apr
2014
Oct
Sep
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Sep
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Mar
2010
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Jan
2009
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feed
Follow @googlepolitics
Calling All Google Politics Trendspotters!
Spot a political, issue or campaign search trend on the web that we should feature?
Submit Your Trends Here
No comments :
Post a Comment