BigApps and transparency

Today on Next American City I have a piece on Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC BigApps competition, whose winners were announced earlier this month. The competition selected the best app to take advantage of a new mine of government data, with a $5,000 prize and lunch with the mayor up for grabs. But there was more at stake than rent money and a fancy meal – BigApps, like Washington, D.C.’s Apps for Democracy, signals the city’s intention to make municipal information more transparent and accessible. The winning entries were transportation apps, but good government groups hope that opening up government data will improve officials’ accountability in the long run. For that reason, the administration’s resistance to efforts in the City Council to make city data available automatically has raised some concerns about Bloomberg’s commitment to transparency – as has the administration’s refusal to make public the traffic report on the Broadway closures and the NYT’s recent stories on the manipulation of crime data. You can read the story here.