Win – BetaNYC

Making History – The First Hackathon Inside the historic New York City Hall

In partnership with the Department of Education’s Computer Science for All and NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson, and Technology Committee Chair Council Member Peter Koo, BetaNYC co-hosted 130 students and 30 teachers in the City’s historic Council Chambers for the finale of the second annual Hack League. These Twenty-eight teams, from all five boroughs, used municipal open data and media literacy skills to identify community concerns, and computer science concepts to build prototypes to address the final challenge — identifying internal and external metrics, potential stakeholders, and extending their prototypes.

🗽 ❤ 💻 — NYC SoData 2018 Recap

How we build is as important as what we build. – Chris Whong, NYC Planning Labs Thank you for making NYC’s School of Data an amazing day and making NYC’s second annual open data week an epic adventure across the Boroughs! 2018 is our second year where we simultaneously celebrated International Open Data Day and […]

Dear de Blasio, Re: NYC Automated Decision Systems Task Force — #NYCAlgorithms

For the past year, BetaNYC has called on NYC government to be a global leader on algorithmic government. In the fall of 2017, CM Vacca introduced a bill that was turned into Local Law 49 of 2018. This #NYCAlgorithms LAW gives the city up to 24 months to create a task force and articulate how […]

a HUGE win for NYC’s legislative data.

For the last four years, we have been working with various City Council members to get the City’s “source code” online — we’re talking about the City’s charter, laws, rules, and daily record. The City’s charter is equivalent of the city’s constitution. According to the City’s law department, “the charter is the document that defines […]

How to improve NYC’s open data law 2.0?

Last week, we had the chance to join with members of the NYC Transparency Working Group and provide feedback on the future of NYC’s open data law (video). As this bill is under discussion we encourage all to provided your thoughts via councilmatic. Intro 1525-2017 This bill would require updates to the agency compliance plan, to […]

NYC Planning Data Jam Recap

Event Summary On May 8th, fifty urban planners, data scientists, and civic hackers came together for the Department of City Planning’s first data jam! For the day, participants improved NYC’s most comprehensive dataset of facilities. This facilities database is produced by the NYC Department of City Planning and is used to shape NYC’s neighborhoods. It […]

Video: Represent NYC: Probing Open Data to Solve NYC’s Problems

For the last two years, BetaNYC has partnered with Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer to create the Civic Innovation Fellowship. This program has created the City’s first open data and civic technology curriculum, performed a gap analysis on Manhattan Community Board’s capacity to use civic technology, and is currently producing three new tools to […]

Give feedback on NYC’s proposed geospatial #opendata standards

Since 2013, members of BetaNYC have advocated for the City’s open data to conform to open standards. Through our work trying to scrape the City Record, we unearthed headaches trying to define what is where. In a city as complex as the one beneath our feet, there are at least three ways to describe that location. Last […]