Our Community
Our community and newsletter are at the core of our work. We started off as a meetup and have always celebrated our collective wins. Without our community, we couldn’t do what we have done.
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Civic Innovation Fellowship
The NYC Civic Innovation Fellows Program (CIF) is fostering the next generation of community leaders by developing digital and data literacy practices that are appropriate for the local constituencies they serve.
The Civic Innovation Fellowship is the first and only comprehensive program dedicated to training the next generation of civic leaders from CUNY while improving open data and public interest technology within community boards and other civic NYC organizations.
The Fellowship is hosted out of the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, with support from the Office of Technology and Innovation’s Open Data Team, and CUNY Service Corps. Fellows are carefully selected from the CUNY’s annual Service Corps program.
Read more about our NYC Civic Innovation Fellows Program.
Learn more about our Apprenticeship Program
Civic Innovation Lab
The Civic Innovation Lab is where BetaNYC learns about and solves problems with government agencies and community-based organizations. We use data, technology, and design to address emergent requests and help provide digital services to as many under-resourced organizations as possible.
If you need ANY type of technical assistance, data analysis, or research, our Research and Data Assistance Requests (RADARs) can help you.
Our lab focuses on strategy, events, design, technology, and data wrangling. Our goal is to rethink civic engagement for the 21st century.
Learn more about our the Civic Innovation Lab.
Learn more about our Research and Data Assistance Requests (RADARs).
Learn more about our Tools.
Research and Publications
BetaNYC believes in the value of researching and documenting the state of New York City’s Public Interest technology ecosystem. We are always working with various Administration Officials and City Council members to improve the City’s “source code” — we’re talking about the City’s charter, laws, rules, and daily record!
Read more about our campaigns via our blog.
Read our testimony to the New York City Council, Assembly, and Senate.
Read more about our publications.
Public Programs
We started as a meetup and fundamentally believe that public programs enable us to demystify civics and data. While we have organized a handful of independent initiatives, we work to ensure public events are with government stakeholders. We can not improve government if government is not working with us.
Our work spans the spectrum of abilities and literacy capabilities. From our intro to open data to our open data festivals to hackathons to our open data ambassadors program, BetaNYC builds civic engagement events for all.
Our notable hackathons include NYC TreesCount! Data Jam, NYC Planning Data Jam, NYC 311 Data Jam, and Mobility for All Abilities Hackathon.
NYC Open Data Ambassadors
The Open Data Ambassadors (ODA) program recruits, trains, and certifies digitally literate cohorts of volunteer ambassadors to teach about NYC Open Data across the diverse communities of New York City. By working with libraries and community organizations, Open Data Ambassadors will help to bridge data literacy gaps and promote neighborhood and issue-based dialogue. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC.
For more information, visit the Ambassadors page on the City’s Open Data site.
Open Data Week
Open Data Week is an annual festival of community-driven events organized and produced by the NYC Open Data Team at the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), BetaNYC, and Data Through Design.
Every March, New Yorkers come together online and across the five boroughs to celebrate New York City’s Open Data Law, which was signed into law on March 7, 2012. Coincidentally, the first weekend of March is also International Open Data Day. With these dates anchoring Open Data Week, we rally NYC’s civic tech and open data communities and offer opportunities for more people to learn about and engage with municipal open data.
For more information, visit www.open-data.nyc
For archived videos & presentations, visit archive.open-data.nyc
NYC School of Data
New York City School of Data is a community conference showcasing the City’s civic design, civic/government technology, and open data ecosystem. We seek to build a framework of relationships that can demystify data and technology, foster democracy, build cross-borough relationships, and mentor a new generation of civic leaders.
For more information, visit www.schoolofdata.nyc
Open Data Curriculum and Journeys
We believe that government information should be accessible and easily understandable. Since the passage of NYC’s open data law, we have worked with a number of partners to make tutorials, tools, and classes. In partnership with Hon. Gale A. Brewer, the author of NYC’s open data law, our Civic Innovation Lab program has developed a number of interlocking workshops and tools to demystify data and turn it into action.
Check out our open data curriculum.
In each data journey, BetaNYC Civic Innovation Fellows and Apprentices will pose a topic question and take you on a step-by-step investigation to answer it. You will gain insight into a process of accessing, cleaning, and manipulating data, and become acquainted with a set of tools to conduct an analysis. At the end of each journey, we will hold a brief Q&A.
Check out our open data journeys.