New York City Council member Gale Brewer has been trying to open up the city’s inner workings to the public since the time when an IBM Selectric passed for a sophisticated information technology device.
“I’ve been into government transparency for so long that in the typing days I used to type up lists of government contacts and give them out to people,” says Brewer.
Since that primitive era, the amount of data generated by the city and its potential usability has increased exponentially. Its availability to the public, however, did not always keep pace.
That’s why Brewer and her allies in city government pushed for the passage last year of landmark open-data legislation that is designed to take all the information in the hands of city government and making it available to the public. This week is the one-year anniversary of the bill’s passage, and marks one of the bill’s first deadlines.
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