The People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City
A spotlight on a 2018 Global Sprint project
Lauren Rennée (@lbrennee), Ashley Cortez(@ashleycortez), and Ben Chrobot (@bchrobot) make up the team at BetaNYC (@betanyc) leading the update of the People’s Roadmap. Together, they were selected to join the current round of Mozilla Open Leaders with their work guiding the digital future of New York City.
I interviewed Ashley, Lauren, and Ben to learn more about The People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City and how you can help at the Mozilla’s Global Sprint 2018.
What is The People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City?
The People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City is a citizen-created policy document that provides short-term recommendations to guide the use of technology by government. The roadmap aims to ensure that government technology is reflective of and serves the people of New York City. The People’s Roadmap was first published by BetaNYC in 2013 and contains 34 policy recommendations in the form of programs, initiatives, and tools.
Why did you start The People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City?
- The People’s Roadmap was created to supplement three digital roadmaps that were produced by the mayor’s office between 2011 and 2013. This strategic plan aimed to provide guidance to the incoming mayoral administration and other elected officials on how to transform New York into a premier digital city.
- The document has been quite effective: 14 of the proposals were drafted into legislation, 9 were signed into law, and another 9 became public-private partnerships.
- We are now in a position to update the 2013 roadmap. 2018 has brought the start of our mayor’s second (and last) term and a new City Council. The People’s Roadmap Update would include brand new policies, projects, and potential partnerships that would address the community identified issues surrounding the digital future of New York City.
What have you learned after your first Roadmap in 2013?
- That the document needs to be more user-friendly (it’s long and challenging to navigate!) so it can be used by a wider audience, especially those who are not familiar with the issues it addresses or are new to the civic-tech space.
- Proposals need to be more actionable — this go-around, we want to do a better job at translating proposals into action-items that can be better implemented by government and community partners. This means involving decision-makers and subject-matter experts in our outreach process and bringing them back in to help refine our policy recommendations.
- We want the updated roadmap feature more voices. New York City’s civic-tech landscape has widely changed since 2013.
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
- Introducing people to the People’s Roadmap who have no previous exposure to the subject matter or strategic plans. The subject matter is dense and policy documents are boring!
- Synthesizing the feedback we have received in our workshops into issue statements and potential proposals.
- Developing/adapting an online engagement platform where we can solicit ideas and and validate proposals
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
We could use help from people with experience in:
- Community engagement (in-person and online)
- Qualitative survey design and analytics
- Plan and report writing and presentation
- Project management
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?
- Check out our github repo (https://github.com/BetaNYC/peoples-roadmap-2018)! We have outlined several tasks that we could use help with in the repo’s issue tracker tagged with #mozsprint.
- Chat with us on Slack!. Request an invite to BetaNYC’s slack from http://slack.beta.nyc/ and find us at #peoples-roadmap-2018.
- If you are in the NYC area on Thursday, come hang out with us at the Trust for Public Land. Register here: https://ti.to/Mozilla/global-sprint-trust-for-public-land-new-york18
Our team members will be available to answer any questions you have during 9am to 5pm ET on both days of the sprint.
What meme or gif best represents your project?
Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today
