Uncarved

These days, anyone organizing competent promotional efforts (events, organizations, themselves, etc) invests various degrees of their attentions to online efforts. One reason for this is economics: efforts to “spread the word” online has the potential to reach more people at the expense of fewer resources and, therefore, less money.

One of the most commonly-leveraged contact points has become the email inbox.

Nearly everyone has an email address, and many of us have several – one for work, one personal. I presently have four, for example.

Generally speaking, people have largely become very comfortable communicating over email. It doesn’t carry the “burden” of requiring an immediate response, unlike a phone call, and can be whatever length the author thinks is appropriate for the correspondence.

It’s also easy to share information around the conversation in emails, by including a URL that points to further information on some website, or by attaching photos or other small files. This capability allows promoters to keep their message concise (if they’re clever), and yet provide leads to supplemental information for those with interest in pursuing the deeper details of the message.

Finally, it allows the author to write up a single message that can be delivered to a (theoretically) limitless number of people.

For all these reasons, one of the most common techniques that promoters adopt is the email campaign. They focus efforts on accumulating email addresses of people that could potentially be interested in their product, services, performances, or whatever it is they’re on a mission to promote.

Some years ago, I would share my email address with people and organizations whose news I’d have interest in following: bands, artists, pro-social organizations, and more.

But after a while, I noticed my inbox just blowing up.

The more I gave my email address out, the more emails I’d have to deal with every day.

I’m not really interested in anyone’s ideas on how I can be making millions from home, offers for debt reduction, or substances that promise me the ability to drive nails through wooden boards with my penis (promise me the same for granite, however, and maybe we’ll talk).

Read more…

General Thoughts email, promotion, social media, unplugging

Thursday was a happy day¹ for me. I was quite proud to learn yesterday that NYC has finally publicly demonstrated some evidence of tangible commitment to participating in the “open government” movement.

On 8 October 2009, NYC published a collection of open datasets in various machine-readable formats, from RSS feeds, spreadsheets, and more. These datasets are available at the NYC Data Mine. The NYC Data Mine is presently divided into two general types of datasets: the Geo Data Catalog, which offers “administrative and political boundaries, facilities and structures, and various imagery and base maps”; and the Raw Data Catalog, which offers all sorts of other types of data in the form of spreadsheets, RSS feeds, and various XML document formats.

Having browsed at what’s presently published in the NYC Data Mine, I must admit that – in its present state – I find the breadth of the offered data to be lacking. If this is the final state of things, it’d be lame compared – for example – to the data that the state of Utah has published.

That said, I’m willing to give NYC the benefit of the doubt here. Every effort has to start somewhere.

Moving forward, however, I’d still like to see the following:

• A complete itemization of the City’s expenditures, down to the dime, including staff and office-holder payrolls.

• NYC public school data, from student performance metrics to faculty information and budgetary expenditures to nutritional reports outlining what foods are served (and the serving volume) by each school.

• Geo data showing property and business taxes collected by the City, perhaps down to the block level (I can anticipate concerns over privacy issues arising at any greater granularity).

• Public heath care data, including frequency of reported ailments, injury, etc at each hospital, school, and other institution.

Note that, in all cases, data collection should err on the side of preserving anonymity, whenever there is reasonable concern that the data can be traced back to specific private citizens (especially with respect to specific individuals’ health and educational situations).

But the announcement of NYC’s Data Mine is only part of the story.

The City also launched NYC BigApps, a competition intended to raise awareness of this new open dataset, and to promote its use to create new tools to serve New Yorker City residents, businesses, and visitors.

From Mayor Bloomberg’s introductory post on the competition site’s blog:

NYC BigApps provides a competitive outlet for developers and encourages the general public to get involved as well. We welcome public comment on the process – indicate your support for the competition, share app ideas, and inform contestants on what type of app you’d like to see.

Ultimately it’s great to finally see NYC – my city – step up to the plate on the open government scene. There’s yet a long (long) way to go, but yesterday’s announcements do give me a glimmer of hope.

So — anyone up for a hackathon weekend… or three?

Government 2.0 government, Government 2.0