BetaNYC is New York City’s civic technology, open data, and civic design community. Starting as a meetup in 2009, it has since grown to be a non-profit organization that hosts events, facilitates policy change, demystifies big ideas, and empowers a new generation of civic hackers. In a strategic partnership with the Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer, BetaNYC is evolving a technology and design lab to support for the City’s community boards.
Via human centered design practices, BetaNYC has worked with the Manhattan Borough President and Manhattan’s Community Boards to outline a number of digital tools and data insights to improve community board operations. Now, we seek an energetic process researcher and civic hacker. Our goal is to map out community board committee workflows, find alignment within those practices, scaffold out data literacy curriculum, and outline product strategies to help community boards better use data in their decision making.
We are looking for an effective communicator and data nerd who can work diligently in a small diverse team, support the work of the lab and the fellows program, and ensure coordination across the projects.
Ideally, you are a creative thinker who wants to solve the hardest civic data problem at scale. We operate on open source principles: you should know how to communicate, collaborate, and think about our work as a collective effort.
Responsibilities and Duties:
- You will assist with the operations, research, and public engagement of the Civic Innovation Lab’s various projects.
- This position is designed to provide support to both the Director of the Civic Innovation Labs and the Director of the Civic Innovation Fellowship. You will report to the Director of the Civic Innovation Labs, with whom you will set weekly objectives.
- Assist Director of the Civic Innovation Labs with managing current fellows, the recruitment of future fellows, and alumni relations.
- Manage communications with various stakeholders groups, not limited to elected officials, government agencies, community board members, community organizations, and private sector partners.
- Give presentations and trainings
- Research and document community board related workflows and processes to aid with the production of curriculum and trainings.
- Assist with product development, maintenance and support of BoardStat and other tools developed by the Civic Innovation Labs.
- You will be expected to create and maintain documents via Google Docs Suite and Microsoft Office platforms, manage content on BetaNYC’s website, discussion boards, data portal, Github, and social media accounts.
Qualifications and Skills:
- Enthusiasm for subject matter. A can-do solution oriented attitude. Thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. Self-starter able to see what needs to get done and motivate individuals to get it done.
- Attention to detail in your communications, scheduling, interviews, research, and documentation.
- Punctual to meetings, phone calls, and online correspondence. Respect for deadlines.
- Experience keeping many projects on schedule at the same time. Strong organizational skills including process management, project management and logistical considerations. Ability to work in a small team, articulate personal needs, work to address collectively defined goals, and collaborate on the defined mission.
- Strong communicator with the ability to present and facilitate meetings, trainings, and workshops with large and small groups of people. Must be able to present research findings and ideas in reports, memos, and blog posts. Ability to breakdown complex ideas into digestible concepts.
- Comfort and familiarity with data and ability to track and report on basic metrics. Understanding of excel functionalities, data analysis and visualization methods, geographic information systems (GIS), and APIs.
- Preferred experienced, but not required:
- Knowledge of agile methodologies, open source technology, and civic tech movement
- Experience working with government stakeholders and/or experience working within government.
- Basic HTML, CSS, WordPress.
- Business intelligence tools like Tableau, PowerBI, or Grafana, experience with ArcGIS or other GIS platforms
Interested in the position, apply via Screendoor.