Led by New York City Council Member Gale A. Brewer, on Monday June 21, 2010 the New York City Council Committee on Technology will hold a hearing on Open Data standards for all NYC agencies. The specifics of the hearing are as follows:

The New York City Council Committee on Technology will hold an important hearing on open data standards for all city agencies at 10:00am on June 21, 2010 at 250 Broadway, New York, NY (Across the from City Hall).  This bill, Introduction 029-2010 (formerly Intro. 991-2009), is an effort to increase government transparency and facilitate easier access to public data.  Beyond the ‘good government’ benefits of this legislation, the bill will also unlock City data to enable web developers and entrepreneurs to interact with City government in new and unforeseen ways.  Data published under this legislation will be readable by any computer device, whether that is a laptop or a phone, for innovative developments.  This Gov 2.0 inspired transparency legislation, targets application developers, startups, small businesses, and academics with the ultimate goal of strengthening the connection between government and the public, while re-energizing the small business-tech sectors.

Please visit http://nycctechcomm.wordpress.com/opengov/ for information on Int. 029-2010.  If you wish to testify, please contact the Office of Council Member Gale A. Brewer, Kunal Malhotra, Legislative and Budget Director, at (212) 788-6975 or  Samuel Wong, Legislative Aide on Technology, at (212) 788-6975.

Socrata plans to testify in person at the hearing.  The key points we wish to make via our testimony are:

1. Disseminating public data is the right thing to do;

2. Doing so helps hold government accountable, improves efficiency, reduces costs and ultimately stimulates economic growth;

3. There is no need to build an Open Data solution from scratch;

4. Socrata offers a purpose-built Open Data platform empowering government organizations large and small to share their data with the widest array of data consuming audiences. It’s proven in major U.S. cities like Seattle and Chicago as well as in federal agencies, states and counties;

5. Socrata delivers its configurable, customizable platform as a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. We are a market-driven shared services provider. Each organization invests a fraction of the cost alongside the other organizations on our platform. It’s very cost effective and affordable. Organizations benefit from our evolving platform as a monthly service subscription. Depending on the features desired, storage and bandwidth Socrata has plans ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars per month, not  hundreds of millions of dollars as has been previously speculated.

6. We created a 6-minute screencast introducing the Socrata platform and encourage you to watch it as an overview of the platform’s capabilities. You can watch the video at http://links.socrata.com/yx2x/mockups/videos/socrata-platform-v3/

It’s great news that NYC is having these discussions and as importantly that the discussions are taking place in an open and transparent way. We’ll see you at the hearing.