Place 1, Chris Riley
Edit this page1. Do you support the adoption of a comprehensive Open Government Directive by the City of Austin? The Open Government Directive would outline a consistent approach to open data, technology-enabled citizen engagement, open decision-making algorithms, and civic application development and be based on existing documents such as model legislation developed by the Sunlight Foundation, Code for America, and Civic Commons.
I support many of the concepts set out in the Open Government Directive, and I’m open to discussion about acting further on any of them. The Directive does seem broad, and it would require extensive community discussion and consideration, as we had during the consideration of Propositions 1 and 2 a few years ago.
2. Do you support the inclusion of the municipal Open Government Directive’s goals as performance benchmarks for each City of Austin department?
I do support the inclusion of open government goals as benchmarks for each department. Any additional metrics would need to be crafted on a department-by-department basis.
3. Do you support releasing software developed by the City to the public, under an OSI approved open source license, through initiatives such as Civic Commons?
I’m not sure what software the City has developed, but I am open to releasing it under an approved open source license. I would need to learn more about this before acting.
4. Do you support the existence of an Information Authority modeled after the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office to provide oversight of government data as a public good?
We do need to get better at managing information, and I am open to discussion about where that management should reside. My inclination is to support improvements to the way the City Clerk and other departments store and manage information.
5. Do you support studying whether Austin should join cities such as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., in pledging support for a publicly-accessible open-standard protocol for 311 services, such as the currently proposed Open311 API specification?
Yes.
6. Do you support the creation of an application development contest that leverages public data and APIs?
I support making data available and encouraging the private sector to develop applications to bring the data to the consumer in convenient, user-friendly ways.
7. How will you and/or your staff use social media to promote citizen engagement and improved service delivery?
I don’t think I’ll ever be as frequent a Facebook poster as some others. But I will try to post more often than I have. I could do posts to remind people about my weekly office hours, for example.