The Journey Begins

I decided to undertake a straighforward survey of how my local, state and federal elected officials are communicating with their constituents via the internet. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, my representative on the New York City Council is David Yassky, a young, smart, attractive and hard working local politician who many in NYC expected to run for much higher office, but for his enormous blunder in attempting to win a 'historically black' U.S. Congress seat in a heavily minority area of Brooklyn where he did not previously reside. Yassky's run was viewed with deep skepticism by the Black community in New York City and his loss in the Democratic Congressional Primary (with the exception of the last two "Republican" Mayor's Giuliani and Bloomberg, the Democratic primary is the election in NYC) ensured that he will never be Mayor of NYC, a job for which he is otherwise well qualified. The fact that Shirley Chisholm, the nation's first black Congresswoman, held the seat, only served to fan the flames and ensure his villification. All that aside, his website has a perfunctory "Contact David" button. I received an instant email response which directs all press inquiries to his office phone. His response is here:

Thank you for emailing David Yassky.

You can find detailed information about a range of issues on our
website: www.davidyassky.com. If a specific issue is not addressed,
please call the campaign at (718) 399-7234.

If you are inquiring about press matters, scheduling or volunteering,
please call (718) 399-7234.

Thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,
The Team at David Yassky for Congress

Note that his response was signed "The Team at David Yassky for Congress" and the primary ended six months ago. I re-sent a more generic request to discuss the lack of pre-schools in my now heavily gentrified neighborhood of Dumbo and I am awaiting his response via email and hope to interview him for this article soon.

As for the Mayor of the City of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, he can be contacted here. As for interviewing Mayor Bloomberg, I have my own contacts in the Mayor's Press Office, which is just as well, because all inquiries must go through the Press Office via telephone. Perhaps most importantly, at the site for NYC voter registration, there is no online voter registration in NYC. You must mail in a downloadable PDF made out in blue or black ink. I had hoped that the man who made billions from the now ubiquitous "Bloomberg Terminal", and its related online subscription services used by financial professionals worldwide, could do better.

Moving on to New York State, Governor Eliot Spitzer, the independently wealthy and whip-smart, if abrasive, former Attorney General of NYS, rode to an overwhelming electory victory last November, with a promise that "On Day One, Everything Changes" and that he would run the most transparent government in state history. Considering that Albany is one of the most opaque and corrupt state governments in the nation, any improvement would be welcome. Governor Spitzer can be by reached by email here. I am awaiting his office's response to my email request to discuss Open Government. I also hope to speak with Andrew Cuomo to get his insight into the evolving relationship between government and citzens. He has a unique perspective given his executive, political and legal experience in New York and Washington. And he's not shy.

Allow me a brief digression on an important corrollary objective of the Open Source Movement - the adoption and use of Open Source software to (eventually) replace the virtual monopoly of Microsoft's Windows, the enterprise platform of choice for most companies, (except for "creatives" and those who otherwise think for themselves, who are likely to use the Apple OS), with Open Source Software at lower cost and greater flexibility. This boils down to chicken vs. egg. 'If we have more open source software then the political system will be more open' is the argument, and in the abstract it is a difficult proposition on which to make a frontal assault.

I agree that it is desirable to reduce the enterprise and consumer dominance of Microsoft and a few other huge companies (and I assign no sainthood to Apple, who simply make a superior product) and to foster the open dissemination and accompanying scrutiny and innovation of software and operating systems. While desirable and laudable, these type of changes can involve little more than state or local turf warfare over whose politico's vendor friend gets the IT contract. See the Massachusetts Open Source v. proprietary software debate in the state legislature. The redistribution of state and local resources towards Open Source will produce it's own conflicts and scandals in due time, but it won't always translate into more open politicians and improved responsiveness to consituent desires.

At its core, politics is a personal medium, in that policitians evoke reactions in the public that reflect the image, real or imagined, projected by the politicians and assessed by the voters in various personal and media interaction. Open Government ultimately means maximum access to a public servant by the most people at any time. The politicians who thread the needle between taking care of the business of government and being reasonably responsive to their electorate will be the one's who get elected and re-elected.