Tweeting 100 New Ideas for New York

In this campaign to again become the Public Advocate, I want to focus more on ideas than politics-as-usual by showing how to put the new back in New York -- how to advocate for fresh solutions to old problems. And since I just did this for the Obama Administration in my January book, Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President, today my campaign is releasing Change for New York.  You can read the 100 ideas, comment at markgreen.com/100, and follow us as we tweet out four a day for 25 days until the Primary @Green4NY.  Or you can make your idea number 101 by sharing it at markgreen.com/issues-and-ideas.

Some of the 100 ideas include:

GOOD GOVERNMENT

• Ban quid pro quo donations from employees and members of the boards of not-for profits that receive Member Item funding.
• Recover hundreds of millions in government subsidies to big companies by including “clawback” provisions.

GOVERNMENT 2.0: NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR A NEW DEMOCRACY

• Implement “Open 311” by making 311 accessible over the Internet in real-time.
• Make government information available in real-time through an “Open Data Directive” to leave the era of burdensome freedom of information requests behind.

ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE Creative City

• Spur small start ups with $50,000 micro-seed investments.
• Increase access to business and workforce development programs by combining them online.

HOUSING

• Leverage public-private partnerships through an Employer-Assisted Housing (EAH) program to make more affordable housing available.
• Prohibit tenant blacklists through the New York City Commission on Human Rights by adding a protected class to New York City Human Rights Law.

EDUCATING OUR CITY’S FUTURE

• Commit to actually reducing class sizes for K-3 students.
• Give one laptop per child (OLPC) to public school students to break the chains of social and economic inequity so they may join the information based economy of the 21st century.

GREENER CITY

• Reduce frequency of power outages and lower electricity costs by investing in a Smart Grid and Smart Meters.
• Adopt “Green Lighting” for our City’s buildings.

PUBLIC HEALTH & SAFETY

• Improve the health of our children by establishing Health Coordinators in low-income school districts.
• Use the New York Cancer Project as a model to launch studies on asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and obesity, harnessing our City’s biotech and hospital resources.

While some of the proposed solutions are one-shots which stand on their own, many are arrayed around two big themes that can help steer New York City through its next decade.

First, because New York is a “state of minds,” we must become “The Creative City” by focusing economic growth policies on information, cultural and education sectors.  Second, if our private sector can be revitalized in part because of Information Technology, so too should the public sector with City government harnessing all the new ways of communicating with citizens that are based on our physical locations (iPhones, Blackberrys) and on our social networks (Facebook, Twitter).

As the railroads and telephone were breakthrough technologies that transformed our society in the 19th and 20th centuries, information technology -- grounded in the wiki view that no one of us is as smart as all of us -- has the potential to significantly alter and improve the way government delivers city services in the 21st.