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This week in NYC’s #CivicTech – August 20, 2026
Plus: an otter’s big NYC comeback, a PIT Crew debrief, and CityCamp news.
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We are building a better tomorrow today: our impact in 2026, what we made, argued for, and won
Building civic infrastructure is never a thing you ever finish. The City we want to see will always be under construction. Bit by byte, we are at a unique moment in history with the tools, resources, and hope to address systemic issues and injustice, yet continuing to face the uncertainty of authoritarianism and climate change.…
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Public Interest Technologist of the Month: Ariel Kennan
Ariel Kennan is the reason BetaNYC is a technology, data, and design community. When we were first coming together, we talked about data and technology and where the two met. Ariel reframed it.
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Decades in the making: New York City launches its PIT Crew!
New York City has launched the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew: five in-house teams of product managers, designers, engineers, user researchers, and data experts building digital solutions to public problems. The more than $5 million initiative includes one crew supported by The Rockefeller Foundation through the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City. BetaNYC has…
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We Turned Two Decades of Council Budget PDFs Into Open Data. Now the City Should Maintain The Data.
Intro New Yorkers have wanted to see where their tax dollars go for a very long time. In 1907, reformers founded the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, and the following year it staged a “Budget Exhibit” that laid the city’s spending out for ordinary residents to walk through and question. The idea behind it,…
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Queer-Affirming Tech: Highlights from BetaBuilders #001
On June 23, 2026, BetaNYC hosted the first installment of BetaBuilders — a new community event for NYC public-interest tech practitioners, organized by the Associates Board. We held the event at Wilka’s, Manhattan’s first and only women’s sports bar. We are so appreciative of their willingness to host us and build an enduring partnership around…
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Joint Testimony to the NYC Council for Executive Budget Hearing, Public Comment on Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)
Joint Testimony to the NYC Council for Executive Budget Hearing, Public Comment Modest $255,000 investment in OpenRecords portal will encourage better NYC FOIL performance, fully implement Local Law 199 of 2025 Thank you for the opportunity to provide written testimony on the Executive Budget as relates to the budget of the Department of Records and Information…
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This week in NYC #civictech – May 28, 2026
If you’re interested in building NYC’s public interest tech future, we have a space for you. We’re rebooting our community nights as BetaBuilder Nights.
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This week in NYC #civictech – May 22, 2026
Today, we’re launching four new digital democracy tools for AI. New York’s fight for public access to government information goes back to 1649 — when a Dutch lawyer named van der Donck went door to door in New Amsterdam collecting grievances, got thrown in jail for it, and still won. That fight never ended. It…
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New digital democracy tools for AI — MCPs for the Charter/Laws, Council, the City Record, and Checkbook
New Amsterdam’s Open Government History The argument about who controls what the public knows about its government is not a recent one in New York. It goes back to 1649. That year, Adriaen van der Donck — a Dutch lawyer and president of the Nine Men, the colonists’ advisory body to Director-General Stuyvesant — went…
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This week in NYC #CivicTech – May 14, 2026
We’re launching a new class series at a scale we haven’t attempted before, throwing our doors open because this is the moment for it.
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This week in NYC’s #CivicTech – May 7, 2026 (Week 19)
If you’ve watched as many YouTube videos on agentic software development as I have, you’ve been told we’re in a new world. So far that new world looks a lot like the old one: same oppression, same inequality, same distrust in democracy. Last Friday I spoke to NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP)…
