By Adrianne Jeffries 7/14/11 12:57pm

Tech and the City

nyc dot gov

Hooray, the City Wants to Redesign Its Hideous Website. Step One? Hackathon!

UPDATED 2:16 p.m.

Hackathon madness continues! And this time, it’s a civic duty. The mayor’s office is hosting a two-day hackathon the last weekend in July at General Assembly to redesign NYC.gov (or as it may soon be called, NYC.nyc), inviting developers and designers “to create imaginative, new prototypes of NYC.gov, the City of New York’s primary web presence.”

The hackathon is just a first step in the process to redesign the struggling website, which has bloated to almost a million pages, Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne said. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 7/06/11 4:51pm

Tech and the City

City Continues 2.0-Washing With New Website

Web 2.0-washing, or just what we needed? With the exception of the applied sciences campus initiative, the Digital City initiative has been lackluster, its most prominent accomplishment being the hiring of Twitter-popular Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne, whose effectiveness is undermined by ambiguity around what her job is and, more significantly, lack of a serious budget. This why, perhaps, the city keeps making new websites. Read More