Elana from DMI has a great post over at The Albany Project, pointing out that while New York's legislators are debating ticket scalping and whether sweet corn should be the official state vegetable, quite a few more weighty concerns -- from welfare policy to predatory lending to to family leave (see also Steve WFP's excellent report from the Family Leave Roundtable in Schenectady) -- are waiting to be addressed. She also puts in a plug for DMI's new report:

Some of the issues New York is struggling to handle -- subsidy reform, what to do with criminals when they are released from prison, providing universal access to preschool and the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs -- are real challenges but they aren't insurmountable. In fact four localities around the country did tackle these battles with great success. Want to know more?

Our new report "Lessons from the Marketplace: Four Proven Progressive Policies from DMI’s Marketplace of Ideas
(And how New York can do them even better)" reveals how it all was achieved.  read more »

Location

Have you noticed how it is almost impossible to find information about New York government online --even if there are state and local websites to provide us with the information we seek?

New York City and New York State government agency websites exist in a world of web 1.0 suckitude and are some of the most offensively unusable sites on the web.

At least by my standards.

So I have made it possible for us here at The Daily Gotham, to start indexing and rating every online resource New Yorkers should know about.

With your help I hope we can index every government agency, every political organization, every think tank, every ANYTHING available to citizens on the web looking for resources to become better citizens.

The best part? Not only do reviewers get to rate in a scale from 1 to 5 how good or bad the site is, but readers will also be able to vote the site up or down.

Here are some guidelines for submission :  read more »