NYC Digital – Cloud Roadmap for the Digital City » Community

The Canadian Federal Government has defined a road map for their adoption of Cloud Computing, and the type of capabilities this can enable is powerfully articulated through New York’s Roadmap for the Digital City (65-page PDF).

This really does offer the poster child reference model for Digital Economy innovation leadership.

Their program blends together foundations of Open Government, Citizen engagement, universal Internet access and an industry stimulation focus to communicate an exciting vision of Policy Leadership that will encourage and enable a new generation of entrepreneurs.

With goals of attracting new engineering talent to the city and providing technology to support more entrepreneurism, they’re accurately linking investments in social media and IT platforms to meaningful outcomes.

They operate over 200 social media channels, blogs, newsletters and mobile applications, and wire these up to citizen interfaces like 311 services, with the heart of this technology described as the Cloud-based Open Data API:

“The single greatest request from the developer community was nearly uniform: a RESTful Read/Write api, or Application Programming Interface, for public data and services. Some commentators added that open source software will ensure that data is easily, lawfully extractable and processable. Developers also advocated for a secure, cloud-based infrastructure to ensure scalability. An api enables different software programs to communicate with each other, supporting an ecosystem of tools and features powered by an application.”

They explain how this technology platform will play a central role in enabling them to realize a compelling vision:

“The City of New York will build on this success by embracing the opportunity to become the world’s most comprehensively Open Government. Using technology to enable even greater access to information and services, the City of New York, led by doitt, will create a powerful nyc Platform that supports innovation, efficiency, and economic growth.”