Content about New York City

New York City is now one year in with their Road Map for the Digital City, the city’s plan to make New York the world’s leading digital city. Are they on to something big? Were their first year ambitions realistic? The process is definitely underway, but more challenges exist.

What would it be like to measure and publicize the emotions of a city’s dwellers? Would we like what we saw? Would it benefit us? Or in an era of data deluge, are there some things that are simply better left unknown? Well, that really depends on whom you ask. This question was the philosophical heart of an art installation that made a splash a few years ago when it was first installed in Berlin, and later in Lindau, a small town in southern Germany.

We see them every day, popping up on our Twitter feeds, filtered through blogs, or even scattered throughout the New York Times: maps portraying not the usual locations or destinations, but data. From people’s kisses in Toronto, to the concentration of pizza joints in New York, to the number of women who ride bikes, to the likelihood of being killed by a car in any given American city, the list of lenses through which we can now view our cities and neighborhoods goes on, thanks to data-mapping geeks.

There is a little-known struggle going on right now over how a new series of “top level domains” (TLDs) on the Internet shall be used by cities of the world. TLDs are the suffixes at the end of Web addresses, such as .com, .org and .edu. The international body that oversees TLDs is expected to announce a new series of TLDs in 2012 that would give cities their own TLDs (e.g. .nyc or .paris). The new TLDs could make it easier for people in the same metropolitan areas to find each other and interconnect on the Internet and in physical spaces.

Recently, New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced $15,000 worth of private grants to community groups to fund gardening, composting and stewardship of the city's community gardens and other green spaces. The 19 community groups who were awarded funding for their projects, applied for grants the city’s new community collaboration platform, Change by Us.

Did you know that there is nature in New York City?  The five boroughs are rich with forests, marshes, and meadows – more nature than any other city in North America.  Yet these natural resources are threatened by habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation - the same factors that threaten biodiversity everywhere.

This year Come Out & Play will be holding a Field Day of exciting new outdoor games on Governors Island in New York City on July 16. The Field Day is being run in partnership with the River to River Festival.

New York City rang in the new year with a new internal innovation software platform.  A division of Spigit’s idea management platform, “Simplicity” is being adopted city-wide in a two-phase roll-out that will eventually include all 300,000 New York City employees.