Players

This is civic tech: This morning, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio rolled out the city’s new Digital Playbook with an announcement event here at Civic Hall. Its goal “is to improve constantly the delivery of City services, embrace government transparency, generate genuine civic engagement, and make New York the most user-friendly and innovative city in the world.” The playbook calls for the development of “accurate, responsive services,” “human-centered research, design and evaluation,””seamless services” across multiple agencies, a single sign-on experience for users, and the use of common data standards to make it easier for people to access, share, and build on the city’s information.

“This is another element of fighting inequality,” de Blasio declared. “To make more information available and to make more access to power available. We intend to be very focused in breaking down those barriers and opening things up….It’s our obligation to be in a constant dialogue with our people.” He called on the city’s tech community to hold City Hall accountable to the promises in the playbook, and insisted that they were essential to his administration’s efforts to improve housing, education and the like.

In addition to Jessica Singleton, the city’s chief digital officer and Minerva Tantoco, the city’s chief technology officer, de Blasio gave credit for the playbook’s development to Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Councilman Ben Kallos for their ongoing efforts to make the city more digital.

Ironically, de Blasio was interviewed by new Uber board member Arianna Huffington, who took several opportunities to plug her current book project, the “need to recharge” and the value of getting 8 hours of sleep—things that techies tend to think about only in terms of lithium ion batteries and weeks, not days.

And despite his call to “open things up” and “be in constant dialogue with our people,” the Mayor and Huffington unfortunately had no time to take questions from the public during the launch event.

“With the launch of the NYC Digital Services Playbook, technology, data, and design become the corner stone of a 21st century New York City,” Noel Hidalgo, the Executive Director of BetaNYC commented, applauding the launch. BetaNYC is calling for the city to create a “unified digital services department” to insure that the principles laid out in the playbook actually get implemented.

In other civic tech news, the Smart Chicago Collaborative is going to start putting some of its civic tech code up on Amazon as machine images, in partnership with Uturn Data Solutions, Daniel O’Neil announces.

Derek Eder of Chi Hack Night offers 10 lessons for how to organize a successful local civic hacking community.

Placemeter’s David Fine argues that civic hacking sits at the intersection of application development, data science and activism/advocacy.

What sharing economy? Uber and Lyft spent $8 million pushing to get the city of Austin, Texas to end a local regulation requiring fingerprinting and criminal background checks of drivers who use ride-hailing apps, about 100 times more than supporters of the rule, but on Saturday the companies lost 56-44 percent at the ballot box.

Uber is also being sued in federal court by a local Austin activist for allegedly robo-texting thousands of Austinites as part of its campaign to get out the vote, Nolan Hicks reports for the Austin American-Statesman. (To prevent spam, it is illegal to mass-text message recipients.)

Crypto-wars, continued: Twitter is reportedly no longer allowing Dataminr to sell data services to U.S. intelligence agencies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The lobbying in Washington over regulating encryption is intensifying, Cecilia Kang reports for the New York Times.