New Council Gov Ops Chair is Civic Technologist

It’s been a great couple of months for prominent NYC civic technologist Ben Kallos; In November, Kallos was elected to represent Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the city council, and today he was appointed chair of the Council’s Government Operations committee.

Along with newly appointed Technology Chair Jimmy Vaca, Kallos’s support will be crucial for advancing open government legislation and oversight in Council. Kallos comes to the council after a stint at the good government group, the New Roosevelt Initiative. He also is an experienced web developer and has created a number of open government tools including: OpenLegislation.org to put New York State Assembly and New York State Senate attendance and voting records online for free for the first time,WikiLaw.org (merged with JurisPedia.org) to make the law more accessible, and VoterSearch.org.

We look forward to working with Ben and his colleague Jimmy Vaca on new legislation to modernize how city agencies respond to the state Freedom of Information Law, and to improve, expand and accelerate implementation of the open data law, and new public facing technology.