RIOC Operations Committee Meeting Today After 4 Months To Discuss Ongoing Construction and Infrastructure Projects - How About Publishing Roosevelt Island Data On Web For New Apps?

The Roosevelt Island Operating Corp (RIOC) Operations Committee will be meeting later this afternoon for the first time since July 29, 2011. According to RIOC:

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that a meeting of the Operations Advisory Committee of the RIOC Board of Directors will be held on Monday, November 28, 2011 at 5:30 p.m. at the RIOC administrative office, 591 Main Street, Roosevelt Island, New York.

The Committee will meet to discuss ongoing construction and infrastructure projects and planning.

One area of Roosevelt Island Operations that I would like to see RIOC take advantage of is opening up and sharing the data it collects to the public. Here's a very interesting article on cities and municipalities sharing their data with the public on the web. An excerpt:

... Across the country, geeks are using mountains of data that city officials are dumping on the Web to create everything from smartphone tree identifiers and street sweeper alarms to neighborhood crime notifiers and apps that sound the alarm when customers enter a restaurant that got low marks on a recent inspection.

The emergence of city apps comes as a result of the rise of the open data movement in U.S. cities, or what advocates like to call Government 2.0....

...  In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing open data as a key component of his effort to transform the city into Silicon Valley's chief rival.

The city is in its third year of sponsoring the NYC BigApps competition, in which programmers compete to build useful new apps based on city data.

At a recent weekend "hackathon," first prize went to "Can I Park Here?," an app that matches location information from a user's smartphone to a database of city parking regulations to cut through the clutter of confusing parking signs with the message "Don't park here!"...

Roosevelt Island information such as Red Bus, Tram and subway ridership, street and Motorgate parking and event scheduling are examples of data that RIOC collects that can be published on the web. We have some very smart techies on Roosevelt Island. You never know what they might come up with that would be beneficial to the community.

Here's a video from Gov Fresh showing NYC Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne demonstrating how open digital info is changing the delivery of services to New Yorkers.

You Tube Video of Open Data Government Innovation

RIOC already uses the RI 311 See Click Fix reporting system,  Next Bus Red Bus GPS Tracking info and has met with the team behind the Roadify transportation app. All of these innovative digital initiatives were started by former RIOC Director Jonathan Kalkin.

Kudos to RIOC for recently winning a NY State award for innovative use of digital technology. That's a great start. We can do more.

An example of what a Roosevelt Island resident can produce is this Android Cell Phone Red Bus Tracking App from Vini Fortuna.