Mayor-elect de Blasio wants your ideas and resumes

New transition website up and running

November 6, 2013 By Mary Frost Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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Want to submit a helpful idea – or your resume — to New York City’s Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio?

De Blasio hit the ground running Wednesday morning with a new website (transition2013.com) that allows citizens to plug directly into his transition effort.

Transition2013 fits in with de Blasio’s promise to provide transparent, open access to everyday New Yorkers.

The simple, cleanly designed site has areas where visitors can “Apply for Jobs,” “Message Bill,” “Volunteer” or “Submit Your Idea.” People who just want to sign up for updates can do that as well.

On the site, de Blasio also introduces his transition team, and a new Twitter handle (@NYCtransition).

“This website is where you can engage directly with the transition effort and stay up to date with the latest decisions and announcements as we prepare to open a new chapter of our city’s history,” de Blasio says in a statement on the site. “Sign up for email updates, share your ideas for how City Hall could improve the quality of life in your neighborhood, send my team a note, or submit your application to be a part of the new administration.”

The website will also help de Blasio handle what could prove to be a huge surge of ideas and requests from the thousands of voters who want to help de Blasio “think big” and write what he calls his “Blueprint for Progress.”

Advocates of open governance hope that de Blasio will use his online presence to expand the use of Participatory Budgeting (PBNYC), where citizens themselves choose how major chunks of the budget are spent in their own communities.

Hollie Russon Gilman writes on NYU’s The Governance Lab blog that de Blasio’s election could be New York’s “big participatory budgeting moment.” She tweets that the new website is “a very interesting opportunity for scaling up PBNYC.”

Not everyone can get to de Blasio’s transition website, however.

Francesco Portelos tweeted on Wednesday, “http://transistion2013.com is blocked on NYC Schools computers. I would call DIIT to fix.”