Press Releases

New York, NY – An “Anti Tenant-Blacklist” City Council bill to be introduced today would protect tenants named in housing court from being placed on “blacklists." The legislation, sponsored by Council Members Ben Kallos, Rory Lancman, Alan Maisel, and Mark Levine would prevent landlords from using the information to discriminate against tenants when they have satisfied the terms of an order issued in housing court. The so-called blacklists contain an estimated hundreds of thousands of names of would-be renters.

New York, NY – Following the New York Court of Appeals' decision in Wallach vs. Town of Dryden and Cooperstown Holstein vs. Town of Middlefield to allow municipalities to ban fracking within their limits, Council Members Ben Kallos, Helen Rosenthal and Costa Constantinides have introduced a bill for New York City to stand in solidarity with Otsego County’s Middlefield and Tompkins County’s Dryden in banning hydro-fracking. The move is a strong statement from New York City against fracking in the city, surrounding areas and the state. 
 
According to FracTracker.org, New York City would be joining 80 municipalities with a ban, 100 with moratorium in place, and 87 making a push for a ban or moratorium. Though there are many unknowns about hydrofracking, it has already been shown to pose serious dangers to human health and the environment, including:

Democracy must be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Today, that means freeing government from the chains of a bureaucracy intentionally created to maintain the status quo.  Digital democracy can help facilitate a more agile government that is as responsive to the needs of its people as the private sector is to its clients. In so doing, digital democracy cannot simply replace more traditional forms of record-keeping and communication, but must meet the people where they are, and to open democracy up to new possibilities.

Digital democracy can provide new tools to support making laws, representing citizens, scrutinizing the work and performance of government, encouraging citizens to engage with democracy, and facilitating dialogue amongst citizens.  While implementing digital democracy, the Digital Democracy Commission has an opportunity to build free and open source software tools in the United Kingdom that can be shared with localities as well as globally.

The recent experience of legislators in New York City, New York State, and the United States of America has illustrated the importance of several key components of a digital democracy:

• Law is a constantly changing code, and we must treat it as such when designing publication platforms. The free and open source software model can inform the principles by which the law is created and disseminated. If residents are presumed to know the law, then the law must be published for free online for anybody to access.
• Legislation should be treated as a work in progress, which can be drafted, commented on and followed by any interested resident.
• Representing citizens can be improved using a customer relationship management (CRM) software as well as a single point of contact such as a phone number like 311 or platform with an open API like open 311 for non-emergency government service requests and tracking of those requests until issues have been resolved.
• Scrutinizing the work and performance of government is essential but dependent on underlying laws that provide for open meetings along with their video and webcast, freedom of information law, open 311, open legislation and law, along with placing public notices and data online in a human and computer readable formats available through open application program interfaces (API) in as close to real time as possible.
• Encouraging citizens to engage with democracy can be improved upon by local government officials and agencies by using a combination of low- and high-tech tools to communicate with and serve citizens.
• Facilitating dialogue amongst citizens through programs that encourage and allow substantive resident involvement in government decision-making, such as Participatory Budgeting, result in better understanding of the decisions of government.

The solutions offered and those that the Digital Democracy Commission will ultimately recommend should be scalable and versatile both horizontally and vertically across democracies everywhere at all levels of government.  The Commission has an opportunity to continue and maintain the digital democracy brand as a convening point for the sharing of free and open source software tools and knowledge globally.

New York, NY –  City Council Member Ben Kallos today introduced a bill to create a free Universal E-Hail App to allow New Yorkers to e-hail any of the 13,637 yellow cabs and 6,000 green cabs that participate. The Universal E-Hail App would be contracted or created by the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). It would not alter existing apps and would also allow for any third party app like Uber or Lyft to e-hail yellow and green cabs.
 
“City taxis need an app of their own to compete, and New Yorkers need to be able to get a cab in the rain without having to worry about surge pricing.” said City Council Member Ben Kallos, a software developer who used his expertise to propose the app called for in the legislation. “New York City must support our tech sector: Instead of making new technologies illegal, or regulating them out of business, we should provide a level playing field with fair competition so that companies, drivers and riders all win.”