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New York City Hiring Chief Digital Officer

Chief digital officer will develop policies for New York City's social media and digital communications.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg (pictured) has pushed the city government to use new technology to improve service delivery to citizens.

New York City's IT department intends to hire a staff person who would be in charge of the coordinating the city's Web 2.0 initiatives and social media policies.

The position, called the Chief Digital Officer, will work from within the city's Office of Digital Coordination, helping to "develop forward-thinking policies on social media, digital communications, Web 2.0 initiatives and other tools to better serve the public."

The chosen candidate will also work with the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications to improve features on NYC.gov, the city's Web portal. The chief digital officer will also improve the city's digital media activities "through creation and analysis of dashboards, metrics and appropriate analytics," according to a description of the job announcement, which closed late last month.

The hiring of a chief digital officer is yet another innovation coming from New York City, where three-term Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pushed the city government to use new technology to improve service delivery to citizens. Last year, Bloomberg announced the Connected City Initiative, which sought to expand the online capabilities of New York City's 311 service, develop citizen-face applications for mobile devices, and other "Gov 2.0" projects.

The chief digital officer will ensure "consistency and accessibility" of information delivered to the city's websites and to citizens through video-on-demand on mobile devices. The development of a comprehensive citywide policy for government employees who use Web 2.0 for work functions could be groundbreaking, as a recent study from the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany, State University of New York, found that such policies are emerging in state and local government, but their content is incomplete.

At the end of 2009, 15 city agencies were using some form of social media. Around the same time, the city gave residents the option of using Twitter to make service requests on 311 Online.