After successfully rallying New York City’s tech community around policy issues like SOPA and PIPA, as well as the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, the New York Tech Meetup (NYTM) aims to play a more steady role when it comes to the city’s technology policy.

NYTM is taking advantage of its more than 29,000 members by starting discussions around significant policy issues like making high-speed broadband readily available at low-cost and making tech-skills a component of the education system. The results of the discussions will be brought to the attention of candidates running for public office later this year.

With elections taking place for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough presidents, and city council seats, this year is a good opportunity for the tech community to make its voice heard. NYTM has been the heart of NYC’s burgeoning tech community for years, so it’s an ideal outfit to actually make a difference with city politicians.

The meetup is encouraging its members to add to its policy goals, share the initiative over social media, and host public policy meetups of their own.

“It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the opportunity ahead of us,” said the NYTM board in a blog post today. “The policies implemented by public officials going forward will have a profound effect on the city’s future, so by doing our part to ensure the candidates are well-informed and are committed to implementing sound policies, we’ll have played a significant role in helping make a better NYC for everyone for a long time to come.”

Here are the initial policy goals NYTM is pursuing:

1. Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business regardless of location access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.
2. Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy.
3. Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.
4. Support the appointment of a deputy mayor for technology innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.
5. Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.
6. Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful 21st century economy: Selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.
7. Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.

Photo via Chris Isherwood/Flickr

With more than 11,000 payphones that need to be replaced by October 2014, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is tapping into the local tech community to come up with radical new payphone ideas.

Today at the New York Tech Meetup, NYC’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot announced Reinvent Payphones, an initiative to collect virtual and physical prototypes for new payphones from the public.

“We want to invite your prototypes and help build something that could potentially impact the future of payphone infrastructure in NYC,” Haot said.

“We need to replace them, reinvent them, bring these things into the 21st century,” Bloomberg said in a cheeky pre-recorded video conversation with Haot.

In a world increasingly dominated by smartphones and tablets, it’s certainly easy to ignore the lowly payphone. But with such massive infrastructure already in place for NYC’s payphones, they’re also ripe for a complete revamp.

We’ve already seen the city experiment with touchscreens and Wi-Fi hotspots in payphones, but it seems the Mayor’s office is looking for even crazier ideas. “It doesn’t even have to look like a payphone,” Haot noted.

The city will choose up to 15 prototypes to be shown off at a Demo Day on March 5, 2013. The winner will be selected by a panel of judges, including Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, DoSomething CEO Nancy Lublin, Startup Box CEO Majora Carter, 3rd Ward CEO Jason Goodman, and Beth Novek, founder of the White House Open Government Initiative.

“[Payphones are] technologically the most valuable asset we have in the city, and it’d be wrong of us to replace one payphone with just another payphone,” said NYC’s chief information and innovation officer Rahul Merchant at the tech meetup.