Taking a lesson from the City

While the MTA is still trying to figure out what to do with its massive amounts of scheduling data, the City of New York has decided to pursue an open source policy. In fact, as The Times Bits blogs announced today, the City is hosting an application development initiative targeted to the city’s developers and programmers. The City will make available, as Jenna Wortham reports, “170 data sets supplied by over 30 city agencies, including weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales, restaurant inspections and mappable data around school and voting districts.” The winners will receive up to $20,000 in cash, and the applications will be available to the public. While Department of Transportation information will be included in the data sets, the MTA’s information will, sadly, be absent from the competition. This is the path the MTA should follow as it searches for ways to open its data to the public. [NYC Big Apps via Bits]