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What’s New in NYC Civic Tech – September 11, 2025

Noel Hidalgo

To paraphrase His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama: from the moment of birth, and throughout our lives, we depend on kindness. Yet somewhere in middle age, many of us forget it.

Today, we’re reminded of the countless ways kindness shows up—from shelter to a smile, from words of affirmation to friendship. Time and again, New Yorkers have proven that we can’t live here alone. We leaned on one another after 9/11/01, during the blackout, through the 2008 financial crisis, through Superstorm Sandy, and again in the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the last 24 years, we’ve all been affected by 9/11/01, yet we have all centered kindness as our social contract.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve walked down memory lane, reflecting on how this community has grown since we first gathered on March 23, 2009. For more than fifteen years, you’ve shown passion, ingenuity, dedication—and above all, kindness. This past weekend at CUNY Law School, 300 of you built our largest unconference yet, in real time. You can rewatch the introduction—with ASL interpretation—on YouTube, and explore the session notes on “The Board.”

We’re still recovering from the energy of the weekend, and we are deeply grateful to the 60 volunteers and staff who made it possible. Later in this newsletter, we’ll share highlights from social media. If you haven’t had a chance to post your own reflection yet, no rush—we’re still writing ours, and we’d love to read yours when you do.

So, where do we go from here?

At the afterparty, I urged everyone to do more than vote. Bring a friend or neighbor to the polls this fall—ideally here in New York City. Campaigns are running their get-out-the-vote operations now, and the most effective outreach is still a simple conversation: on the phone, at the door, face to face. As a former campaign staffer and volunteer, I know how invaluable your time and voice can be.

The truth is, we need leaders who prioritize kindness and accountability over hate and selfishness.

Next year, we’ll need a mayor who delivers quick wins, invests in people to make them possible, and ensures city services are accessible to all. We’ll need a City Council ready to hold the administration accountable and insist on equity and transparency. We’ll need a Comptroller willing to scrutinize contracts and help streamline the delivery of technology.

And in just 44 days, we begin voting on five ballot initiatives—most aimed at tackling our city’s absurd housing crisis. For background, Hell Gate has a sharp rundown on the housing drama, and The City covers the Board of Elections hearing.

As we move forward, we know we can’t rewrite the past. But together, we can shape the future. This is the meaning of pa’lante. This is excelsior. This is us—choosing community, choosing kindness, choosing to build a future better than the one we inherited.

Here are three things to mark on your calendar:

  • Tuesday, September 16 – National Voter Registration Day. Get someone to change their registration to NYC or get someone excited to 
  • Saturday, October 25 – First day of voting.
  • Tuesday, November 4th – Public Interest Tech Election Night watch party.

Finally, for students: if you’re in NYC and passionate about maps or GIS, check out the Maps @ MIXI Critical Cartography Club at Adelphi University.

Noel Hidalgo

TL;DR

  • Kindness is our social contract. As New Yorkers, we know this, and affirm this daily. 
  • CityCamp NYC intro with ASL interpretation (YouTube)
  • CityCamp NYC unconference board (Google Sheets) 
  • Hellgate and The City’s coverage of the Board of Elections hearing.
  • NYC Votes “Vote like a New Yorker.”
  • If you’re a college student who loves maps, check out Maps @ MIXI critical cartography club at Adelphi University.

Upcoming Events with BetaNYC 🎊

September 12 at 12 pm Discovering NYC Open Data: Online Session, Curious about NYC Open Data? Join the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation’s Open Data Team and BetaNYC for an interactive walkthrough of the city’s open data portal. You’ll get practical tips on finding datasets, practice working with real information, and see how open data has been used to drive community change. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to build your skills, this session will help you unlock the potential of open data for civic action.

September 26 at 3 pm Mapping for Equity: Mapping NYC’s Public Amenities in NYC Council District 4 with BetaNYC, How do we make NYC’s public spaces more visible and accessible? BetaNYC will introduce the Mapping for Equity project, focused on charting parks and public amenities in Council District 4. Learn how we’re using OpenStreetMap to capture the details of our shared spaces, and how this work supports equity, accessibility, and better city planning. Come see how community mapping can reshape the way we understand NYC’s public realm.

Community Resources 📚  

  • Max Weber’s Lessons for Democracies Under Siege by Enrique Krauze 
  • Tech:NYC has booted up the Grid Fellowship – Through a nine-month immersive program, the fellowship will prepare senior leaders — founders, operators, and C-suite executives — to understand and engage with the civic systems that make New York run. Over the course of the program, fellows will get firsthand exposure to the city’s operational backbone and infrastructure. This sounds very similar to long standing Coro NY fellowship in public affairs and The Fund for the New York’s Community Planning Fellows program. 
  • Kudos to Tejasvi Manoj, Time’s Kid of the Year who is protecting seniors from cybercrime.
  • “In a single email, the EPA ended her research into how climate change endangers children. Jane Clougherty spent years studying how extreme weather affects kids’ health. Trump’s EPA cancelled her work as climate threats continue to rise.” by Jessica Kutz (The 19th)
  • Check out Lucy Block’s talk at DataJConf, which emphasized the importance of journalists collaborating with the civic sector and advocacy organizations on data-driven news stories. Video & Slides.
  • “The Washington Post article does a good job covering two realities: How deeply watching a parent’s immigration arrest affects kids, and how DC residents are organizing “walking buses” and neighborhood lookouts to help kids with immigrant parents get safely to school.” HT Julia Gelatt

This Week in NYC Civic Tech 🗽

  • Gridlock Sam is creating a new CUNY school! (NY Times)
  • Behind ‘all-time high’ job growth in NYC, 17,000 government positions sit vacant, yet Unions, lawmakers and employees say it’s still way, way too slow by Annie McDonough (City & State)
  • This week featured some epic congestion pricing news. From the NYC Department of Health: “In this initial look at air quality data from the first three months of congestion relief tolling, we observed steady or decreasing levels of PM2.5 at most sites, both inside and outside the tolling zone, including sites that were predicted to have traffic increases as a result of tolling.” Charles Komanoff wrote a notable opinion piece in Streetsblog. All of this affirms RPA’s research published in June. 

This Week in Data, Tech, & Gov News 🏛️

  • Joel Natividad delves into the process of building a chat interface in the open-source data sharing platform CKAN. Toward the people’s API.
  • “There’s a long, brutal history of design under fascism, and specifically in the way aesthetics are used to define a single national identity.” – Ethan Marcotte 
  • NYC school bus data has some serious issues. By Jessica Gould and Joe Hong (Gothamist) 
  • Covid-19 boosters look to be very effective by Beth Mole (Arstechnica) 
  • Announcing the 2025 FedScoop 50 award winners (FedScoop)
  • CDC Infectious Disease Data Project Shelved by Kristina Fiore (Med Page Today) 
  • Brett Kavanaugh explains that SCOTUS really IS doing racism by Liz Dye (Public Notice) 

Artificial Intelligence 🤖

  • Beth Simone Noveck has announced an 11 part workshop series entitled AI for Democratic Engagement. Also, there is a report! (Reboot Democracy dot AI)
  • While tech companies market AI as a productivity tool for everyone, a UK government study reveals an unexpected result: Neurodiverse employees may be benefiting far more from chatbots than their neurotypical colleagues by Benj Edwards (Arstechnica)
  • Where Are Driverless Cars Going in New York City? By Jose Martinez and Samantha Maldonado (The City)
  • Fourteen teams from ten U.S. states have been selected as the Stage 2 awardees in the Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC), a national competition that helps communities turn emerging research into ready-to-implement solutions. (NSF site)
  • The AI Darwin Awards is a list of some of the worst tech failures of the year and it’s only going to get bigger. By Matthew Gault (404 media) 

Jobs Alert and Announcements 💼 

CityCamp NYC 2025 Recap

Photo of the CUNY - The City of New York logo with CityCamp NYC poster in the background
Photo of CityCamp unconference "board"
Photo of an sign that says "Code of Conduct"

Kudos to Luke Fretwell for provoking the civic tech community to rekindle CityCamps. There are many events happening across the states in the next few weeks. If you are in Tulsa, Atlanta, Gainesville, Oakland, Twin Cities, San Francisco, Portland (PDX), or Eugene, Oregon, you have upcoming CityCamps. 

First, we would like to thank Reinvent Albany and Database Tycoon for their sponsorship of CityCamp NYC 2025.

Jazzy Smith, Shreyas Tallamraju, Kayla Schwoerer, and I kicked off the event. Our ASL interpreters were from SignNexus, and the entire introduction was uploaded to YouTube by ISOC.LIVE. We are very thankful for SignNexus helping us build an inclusive introduction to our public interest tech and open data work. (YouTube)

In the morning introduction, we launched an updated Introduction to Open Data class that includes City and State open data platforms, as well as several open data tools we use. This whole video is presented in American Sign Language (ASL) with spoken audio and text subtitles. (YouTube)

Basic Stats: Total Registered, 301; Total Checked-in, 204; Children Checked-in, 5; Volunteers Checked-in, 46. We had a healthy distribution of gender expressions. Most attendees came from Brooklyn (70), followed by Manhattan (49), Queens (37), The Bronx (5), and Staten Island and New Jersey tied with 4 each. Most people worked for a community-based organization/a non-profit (46), or in the private sector (44).  The largest age group in attendance was 25-34 (76) followed by 35-44 (62).

Write-ups on LinkedIn: Edgar Alfonsecs, Stephen Sciortino, Chloé Anderson, Art Chang, CUNY Public Interest Technology Lab 

Write-ups on Bluesky – Noel Hidalgo, Tasha Williams, Steve Romalewski, Cyd Harrell

Upcoming Events 📅

Note: All times are listed in EDT

Fundraising Appeal 💸

Each week, our newsletter brings together the latest civic tech news, tools, and stories shaping New York City’s future. We connect neighbors, advocates, and public interest technologists with the information they need to make government more open, data more accessible, and communities more equitable.

If this newsletter has helped you learn, share, or take action, we invite you to support it today. Visit beta.nyc/support-us-no-king. 

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