7:31 am Jan. 24, 20114
It's been six months since the Bloomberg Administration created the role of Chief Digital Officer, and they've been combing resumes since to fill the spot. Today they did, naming Rachel Sterne, the 27-year-old founder of citizen journalism site GroundReport and an adjunct professor of social media and entrepreneurship at the Columbia Business School.
Katherine Oliver, the mayor’s office of media and entertainment commissioner, had posted a job description on the city’s site asking for someone who can “help develop forward-thinking policies on social media, digital communications, web 2.0 initiatives and other tools to better serve the public,” and get a salary between $75,000 to $125,000 per year.
“Rachel is someone who has been an influencer in the social media sphere and a civic journalism entrepreneur,” Oliver said in a statement. “She will be a terrific advocate for digital media while at the same time helping to hone the City’s use of social media for years to come.”
Sterne will also serve as an advocate for the city's digital media and tech scene.
Local startups and venture capitalists have not always been happy with the Bloomberg administration: For more than 10 years, the city has been in conversations with leaders of the scene, who have been asking for support for the existing tech community—with more "digital native" liasons and possible rent abatements, for example—and a focus on tech entrepreneurship in schools. NYC Convergence recently interviewed some start-up founders who have been unhappy with intiatives so far.
Part of Sterne’s job will be to help smooth these contentions by opening up the communication lines between the startup scene and the city.
A Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. native, Sterne studied history at New York University. Prior to starting GroundReport, a hyperlocal news platform for citizen reporters all over the world, in 2006, she worked in business development at LimeWire and was a political intern for the State Department on the United Nations Security Council. She also consulted startups and businesses in social media and marketing before taking the chief digital officer position.
"I can’t imagine a more exciting challenge than helping to evolve digital government in the greatest city on earth," Sterne wrote in an email to Capital.
"The focus of my role is to help the city use technology to better serve citizens, and to save tax payers money by making our services more efficient and accessible online. In more concrete terms, I will start with a listening campaign that asks citizens and City agencies for their ideas, requests, and complaints on the City’s digital resources. This will be part of a 90-day report that analyzes our city’s current digital and social media resources, and outlines next steps for both policy and initiatives."
Asked about the challenges that come along with the post, she wrote, "Every worthwhile initiative has challenges, including this one. In government, it’s crucial to keeps costs low and find creative solutions that don’t require tax payer dollars to implement. Thankfully, I can draw on my experience and network from running GroundReport in that respect. In addition, for an incredible city like New York City, it will be crucial that I work with city agencies to make sure that I am helping them do their jobs better. That will be a challenge as there are over 70 agencies, but it’s an integral step. But above all, I am thrilled to take on this role at a time when the Mayor and the City have made it clear that supporting innovation is a priority and enhancing New York City’s customer service is a priority."
"New York City was recently named No. 1 for young entrepreneurs, and we’re just getting started," she wrote.
This is all very encouraging. One thing: why is it that city-wide free Wi-Fi isn't here yet? The entire continent of Africa has free wi-fi. Huge portions of Africa lack clean water, food, and medicine- but they have free wi-fi. If it's possible to organize it for an entire continent thay can't meet basic needs, how can it possibly be unavailable in New York? I understand free wi-fi citywide is an inevitability, but it's absurd it isn't already in place. Hopefully this new initiative means we won't be waiting much longer.
Verizon and Time Warner will of course be resistant to the idea of giving away free wi-fi, and I suppose there's all kinds of proprietary issues involved. This gripe of mine is sort of like my gripe about free health care. It seems like the thing blocking it has less to do with the ability to do it and more to do with the unwillingness on the part of private interests to cooperate with the government on something everybody needs or wants.
But what do I know? I suppose the government can't just legislate the people who own the interweb's tangled strands into cooperation, at least not if we expect it to survive Judicial review. This probably needs to happen on a federal level anyway. I know Sterne will be likely to communicate this to the city, I'm sure the administration already knows. I guess what I'm really hoping is that the start-ups she's going to be liasoning with (if that's even a word) will push for free wi-fi since that would add force to the city's push for greater internet access for the public. Sterne's work on Groundreport makes me think she's sympathetic to this gripe I kvetch about all the time.
I don't know if any other cities of comparable size to NYC have free wi-fi. I suspect there aren't. There's a lot the City needs to do with social media since I feel like they're a little behind on it (although I don't really know). Sterne probably has a lot more things to work on that are actually doable, so free wi-fi is probably not at the top of her list; nor should it be, I suppose.
I'm really just mad I don't have an iPhone. My sad proxy for an iPhone, the iPod Touch, can't work outside my house. My issue with free wi-fi probably has more to do with that than anything else. I should just stop complaining and replce my dumbphone with a smartphone!
Way to go Rachel! It's great to see that organizations and administrations are taking the realm of social media/web 2.0 seriously and that there is room for a youthful perspective in a sometimes old-school world of thinking. I recently was hired as an Online Initiatives Manager and I love that it is constantly evolving. Best of luck.
Really good work, loved the in-depth analysis. Talking about David Carr, I still remember his 2008 memoir,
The Night of the Gun, where he detailed his past experiences with cocaine addiction and included interviews with people from his past, tackling his memoir as if he were reporting on himself. The story then was excerpted in the The New York Times Magazine and his book became a best seller.
Huge fan of him!
Jeremy,Flour Mill Project