1. 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.

Yes, I support this. I also support recording phone conversations at city offices and have been thinking about the idea of putting security cameras in the offices at city hall that would feed directly to a website where the public could watch and listen to the "behind the scenes" actions of council members. I have not committed to this yet, but feel this would be an interesting idea to pursue.

2. Do you support the inclusion of the municipal Open Government Directive’s goals as performance benchmarks for each City of Austin department?

I will say that generally I agree with this statement. It is not specific enough to say that I support it as it does not outline specific actions needing to be taken. I certainly support the concept.

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?

Yes

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?

I am unsure if I support adding to the size and budget of the City by creating a new department. I think a lot of the ideas and concepts could be incorporated into the setup for the open records handlers now. Public information should be made public. This information should always be easily accessible.

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?

I would like to hear more from the community on the benefits of this program. From the way it is described it sounds like an excellent way for the city to operate more effectively and efficiently. I support this idea but do not have enough information to fully commit to implementing it (I do not have information on the cost of this program and not commit to it as such).

6. Do you support the creation of an application development contest that leverages public data and APIs?

These look really impressive! I would definitely be interested in looking into this further and learning more about the programs. Again, this requires investment dollars and the costs will need to be researched.

7. How will you and/or your staff use social media to promote citizen engagement and improved service delivery?

I plan to be open and available to answer questions on my Facebook page on a daily basis. I am already extensively using facebook and twitter and find it is a very easy way to communicate with people. They don't have to show up at a council meeting or a council member's office to communicate with them. This would actually be a preferred method of communication for me. I would still encourage people to come meet in person and speak at council meetings, this would however be a very effective means of engaging people and starting discussions that I absolutely plan to utilize.