NYC Big Apps Allows You To Submit and Vote on NYC Data Ideas

Earlier this month NYC government announced a new initiative named “MediaNYC 2020“. Part of the initiative is to strengthen the way the city shares data with the public. The “New York City Government Data & Related Software Application Competition” has been setup to allow all of us to submit ideas about how the data could be used.

Checkout the full competition application specs here (entries must be in by September 1). Apps for Democracy has setup a site called NYC Big Apps Ideas where people can submit and vote on ideas for how developers/companies might use the NYC data. The ideas would need to be flushed out and proper specifications would need to be written to submit the ideas to the city. The service is a good place to test an idea and receive feedback. Each person is allowed 10 votes to spread around to the ideas they find interesting and useful.

Some of the popular ideas include: Free WiFi locator, realtime bus/subway locator (this needs more than the city and I believe is being tested by the MTA on one bus line), bicycle route map and tracking school performance. As I expected, many of the suggestions are related to transit.