Happy JUNE 2024! Happy Pride Month, Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, Juneteenth, and the start of congestion pricing to you all! As summer approaches, we step off into parade season, the NY State legislation session ends, and we’re thinking about what’s happening in Albany.
A cornerstone of our state democracy is our primary elections, which take place on Tuesday, June 25. State Senate, State Assembly, and Congressional seats are on the ballot. And since many of our districts don’t have competitive general elections, THIS IS THE COMPETITIVE ELECTION. What happens in DC and Albany directly affects you! If you’re unsure of your new district boundaries, visit Boundaries Map and check out the latest districting lines – including US Congress, State Senate, State Assembly, and NYC Council.
Recently, we reached a legislative milestone over ten years in the making! Thanks to the hard work of tireless advocates, Sammy’s Law will go into effect on June 19 (Juneteenth). This means that NYC will finally get home-rule of its speed limits. Thank you Families for Safe Streets, Governor Hochul, Senators, and Assemblymembers. This data-backed law will make our streets safer for all.
Speaking of data laws, did you know there is no statewide open data law, and this is the last week for Albany to shore up its legislative agenda? We’re calling upon our allies to support four bills that boost NY accountability and transparency policies. Reinvent Albany recently published a report highlighting that most NYS agencies’ 2024 transparency plans are incomplete and underwhelming, and the Executive Chamber has yet to publish its plan.
This month’s primaries will set the stage for November’s general election, which will have profound impacts on our futures. Please learn your district boundaries, know who is on the ballot, volunteer if you can, and vote (if you have the right) — our democracy depends on an unbought and unbossed legislature.
Wishing you a fun-filled and active June – LFG to work!
— BetaNYC ❤️
Help us Grow a Better Community! 🪴
We are launching our first Associate Board to support BetaNYC’s mission by being a preeminent group of young professionals/volunteers who commit their time, energy, and talents to hosting events, helping us raise funds, and recruiting more individuals into our public interest technology community. Read more about our needs on our website.
Celebrating Pride Month 🏳️🌈
In honor of Pride Month, we pay tribute to these trailblazers from the LGBTQ+ community who have paved the road in STEM!
Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist. Today, she is the founder and CEO of shift7. Formerly, she served as the third U.S. Chief Technology Officer from 2014-2017, after 11 years as the Vice President of Google. She is an active proponent of STEM education and innovation and has been involved in numerous causes, such as serving as CEO of PlanetOut, a leading global online media company serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered, or LGBT, community.
Tim Gill is a software entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is also the founder of the Gill Foundation, one of the nation’s largest funders of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equal rights work. In addition, he contributed to the Colorado AIDS Project and co-founded the smart home technology start-up Josh.ai.
Angelica Ross is the founder of TransTech Social, an incubator for LGBTQ+ talent with a focus on economically empowering the T, transgender people, in our community. They run education programs, job trainings, and workshops and are dedicated to empowering their community with practical, career-ready skills. She hosted the first TransTech summit in 2017, which has since grown with leaders and corporate partners in business.
What’s New at BetaNYC? ✨
Meet the MTA’s Open Data Teamthis Wednesday at 9:30 am on Zoom! We’ll learn about their operating budget processes and dig into their operations, subsidies, and headcount datasets. Bring your bagel!
Discover NYC Open Data with the Office of Council Member Lincoln Restler and Open Data Ambassadors this Wednesday at 6pm. Don’t miss out on this fun data adventure! Beginners welcome!
Learn about FloodGen, a flood advocacy tool launched by our Civic Innovation Lab that uses generative AI to visualize photorealistic images of potential flood scenarios. And, let us know if you’re interested in collaborating!
Say hello to our Fellowship Team this week at State of the Map 2024, an annual conference for the OpenStreetMap and open mapping community.
Community News, Events and Announcements
Here are some content picks from our community. Share yours in next month’s newsletter.
Civic Tech and Legislation Updates 👀
Get ready to vote for your next Congressperson, State Senator, State Assemblymember, and more on Tuesday, June 25 in the primary election! Early voting begins on June 15. Check out the NYC Board of Elections website to register to vote (before June 15), request a ballot, or find your poll site and voting hours.
From social media regulations to red light cameras, here are some bills to watch during the last week of the legislative session.
The Council Committee on Technology is holding an oversight hearing on cyber security on June 10 at 10am. Sign up to testify and attend to learn about the bills that could limit the use of biometric surveillance and location-sharing technologies — Intro 217 and Intro 425.
Vote on The People’s Money: Decide which community projects to fund through citywide participatory budgeting! New Yorkers ages 11 and up can vote until June 12.
The Office of the New York State Comptroller called for urgent action to lift children out of poverty in a recent report examining child poverty in NY State and the nation using the Official Poverty Measure from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
MTA Open Data published a dataset that captures the Manhattan Central Business District ahead of the start of congestion pricing on June 30. Check out the MTA Central Business District Geofence Dataset and this accompanying map.
According to a study by the American Journal of Public Health, in the first five years of Vision Zero, NYC Medicaid enrollees experienced marked reductions in severe injuries and savings of $90.8 million in Medicaid expenditures. Learn more about this in the study or in this New York Times article.
1 in 5 NYC Asian Americans have been assaulted: This new database helps raise awareness about AAPI hate in the city. Check out AMNY’s announcement.
Nathan Storey used ChatGPT to explore NYC Open Data and found impressive results! Learn how it works, why he thinks it’s amazing, and the pitfalls.
WXY Studio developed a bespoke method for associating street signs to their corresponding curb segment and built NYC Curb Regulations, a comprehensive map of curbside regulations in NYC.
The NYU Furman Center released a one-stop platform for viewing and downloading neighborhood indicators. Explore demographics across neighborhoods with their New York Neighborhood Data Profiles.
Is it better to buy or rent? Use this financial calculator from The Upshot and find out!
Which subway line is the timeliest? How have subway fares and fare evasion rates fluctuated since 1903? Clayton Brossia and Alex Borelli offer detailed insights into the Subway’s infrastructure and historical ridership trends in this Tableau dashboard!
New trees are coming to NYC! The Parks Department plans to plant 9300 new trees this spring, the largest tree-planting spree in almost a decade!
Upcoming Events 📆
June 3-9 New York City Tech Week 2024
June 5 at 9:30am BetaBagels 011: A morning chat with MTA Open Data
June 5 at 6pm Discovering NYC Open Data: Online Session with the Office of Council Member Lincoln Restler
June 6 at 9am Tech for Humanity Summit 2024
June 6 at 2pm Data Duel: The Tableau Viz Games – NYC #TechWeek
June 10 at 10am NYC Council Committee on Technology Oversight – Cybersecurity of New York City Agencies
June 11-13 Mozilla Festival
June 11-13 Lesbians Who Tech 5th Annual Pride Summit
June 12 at 6:30pm Retrieval Augmented Generation and Multimodal Machine Learning ✨
June 18 at 8am Third Annual State of Open Data Policy Summit
June 18 at 5:30pm NYC Civic Tech Networking Hour
June 20 at 5:30pm AI Meetup (June): GenAI, LLMs and ML
July 11 at 5pm Open Data Week Summer Meetup at Randolph Beer
July 17 at 9am Government Innovation Summit
Announcements, Job Openings and Opportunities 📢
Submit to this list by filling out this form and see our #Jobs channel in Slack for more posts.
- Cornell Tech is hiring an Associate Director, PiTech Programs and Partnerships.
- The Department of City Planning is searching for a Senior Data Analyst.
- JustFix is recruiting a Product Design Lead.
- The Mayor’s Office Creative Communications team is seeking a Senior Digital Strategist.
- The Mayor’s Office of Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprises is looking for a Senior Data Analyst.
- The MTA is recruiting a Labor Analyst and a Product Manager Data and API’s.
- The MTA Open Data team is hiring a fall Intern. Applications are due by June 14 at 5pm.
- The New York County District Attorney’s Office is seeking a Data Manager and a Junior Software Engineer.
- The NYC Council is hiring an Investigative Policy Analyst.
- The NYC Housing Authority is seeking a Data Analyst.
- The Office of Asylum Seeker Operations is looking for an Analyst.
- The Office of the Brooklyn Borough President is searching for a Social Media and Digital Content Manager.
- VISAP’24 Diverse Data’s call for entries is open until June 9. Learn more and share your ideas!
Join our community! 🛸
- Slack (View more job announcements in our Jobs Channel!)
- X/Twitter
- YouTube (Catch the latest School of Data and Open Data Week Videos!)
- Threads
- NYC Civic Tech Facebook Group
- Mastodon
- Meetup
- Open Data Week
- GitHub
Like this newsletter and what we do? Donate to our 2024 campaign. Your support will help sustain our apprenticeship programs, civic data research and assistance capabilities, and public programming in 2024.
See you next month! Peace, openness, and gratitude 🗽