Newsletter
Donate
This week in NYC’s #CivicTech Week 22 of 2026 Join us at BetaBuilders Night on June 23!!! Mayor Mamdani announces a Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE). Public Advocate Williams unveils a citywide Internet For All plan. Comptroller Levine's AI fiscal-impact report. Congratulations to Raj Korpan and Nate Cooper, CUNY PIT’s new Associate Directors!!

This week in NYC #civictech – May 28, 2026

,

Noel Hidalgo

Building the plane as we fly it! This week, NYC government refactored itself in public. Mayor Mamdani killed the Adams administration’s “Future of NYC” commission — one of the most-criticized advisory bodies of the prior term — and announced a Commission on Government Efficiency to take its place. You can bet we will be at these hearings advocating bit by byte to use service design, open data, and digital sovereignty to ensure government works for the people and for the era we are in. COGE’rs, we will be!

This morning, Public Advocate Williams unveiled a plan to build a citywide Internet For All — eminent domain of ConEd’s conduits, whaaat?!?! This comes on the heels of the City’s new Internet Master Plan law, which is expected to start public feedback sessions in September with a preliminary master plan in November. If you have an hour, watch our School of Data 2026 session discussing this contentious issue, and note that Noel Hidalgo is the Public Advocate’s appointee to the City’s Internet Advisory Board.

Other things to read this week: the Comptroller’s first-of-its-kind AI fiscal-impact report — and the DTPR AI Register — which we flagged last week, it’s just so good — and Pitchfest is looking for volunteers — and don’t forget to check in with CUNY PIT Lab’s new Associate Directors!

FINALLY, Albany, 57 days late, according to City & State, landed the FY27 state budget that sets the fiscal floor beneath us all.

PS — 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. June will be Pride-focused with queer tech lightning talks. Join us as we build solidarity and opportunity.

— Noel Hidalgo (with Gabby’s support)

Upcoming Events with BetaNYC 📅

Civic Tech News & Updates 🌍

  • Public Advocate Williams unveils plan to build citywide “Internet For All” — A new policy push for affordable, universal broadband in NYC, with a framework for closing the digital divide and a roadmap for delivery. AMNY’s deep-dive companion piece asks the harder execution question — can NYC deliver this without the missteps that sank the last master plan? — NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams · companion: AMNY
  • Mayor Mamdani kills the Adams “Future of NYC” commission and launches his own — Mayor Mamdani ended one of the most-criticized advisory bodies of the prior administration and announced a Commission on Government Efficiency to replace it; the City Hall press release frames the new commission as a structural-reform vehicle, not a study group. — Politico · context: NYC Mayor’s Office
  • NYS FY27 budget lands — the table is now set for the City — Kate Lisa and Rebecca C. Lewis on the 57-day-late $268.5B state budget: immigration protections, education funding increases, climate-law modifications, housing initiatives, public pension reforms, utility relief. The article doesn’t itemize civic-tech, open-data, broadband, or AI provisions — but the state budget is the upstream signal that sets what NYC’s FY27 can plausibly fund. — City & State NY
  • NYC Council announces FY27 participatory-budgeting results — Speaker Julie Menin and Council members released the results of this cycle’s participatory budgeting process, the city’s most direct mechanism for community members to allocate capital funds in their districts. — NYC Council
  • NYC moves to keep more constituent information away from ICE — A new sanctuary-data posture: City & State reports on the agency-by-agency steps the Mamdani administration is taking to limit federal immigration-enforcement access to municipal records. — City & State NY
  • FYI — NYC DTPR AI Register, one more time — A reminder for readers tracking AI accountability: Helpful Places’ independent registry of 86 NYC agency AI systems, built on the Office of Technology and Innovation’s Local Law 35 of 2022 compliance reports, remains the cleanest public surface for what NYC government uses AI for. We flagged the launch last week; surfacing it again because the Comptroller’s AI fiscal-impact report (below) and the Public Advocate’s Internet For All plan (above) make it newly relevant context. — Helpful Places + NYC OTI

AI Roundup 🤖

  • Comptroller Levine: a first-of-its-kind report on AI’s impact on NYC’s economy — From the Comptroller’s office: “Our economists modeled five possible AI scenarios from 2026 to 2030… we need to strengthen our reserves now to prepare for a potential AI-driven recession while adapting to this extraordinary technological shift.” (press release) — NYC Comptroller · full report: comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/ai-and-new-york-citys-fiscal-future
  • Karen Hao launches the AI Resist List — A new directory documenting global resistance to AI empires; built to undercut the inevitability narrative and center hope amid the negative-news churn. — airesistlist.org
  • Demos finds AI chatbots fabricate roughly half their sources — “In nearly half of their responses, the AI systems failed to provide official sources or external links to back up their answers; if links were given, they were sometimes broken. The citations given by ChatGPT were at least a year out of date 44% of the time.” — Demos study, on the Scottish election. — The Guardian
  • Urban Institute on becoming the data-questions go-to for AI — Erika Tyagi, Kristin Blagg, and Emily Gutierrez map how often AI systems get sent to Urban for data answers and how reliable those answers actually are — useful for any civic-tech team thinking about AI search citations. — Urban Institute
  • A field theory for AI in the social sciences — Daedalus essay arguing AI is best treated as a question, an object, and a tool simultaneously — a useful frame for civic-tech researchers tired of the “AI as inevitable infrastructure” framing. — Daedalus / American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Community Wins & Featured Tools 🛠️

Jobs & Opportunities 💼

Events 📅

Media to Watch, Listen, or Read 🎬

  • [READ] NYC’s beach-water-quality team, in the field — Testing the Water: meet the team who checks NYC’s beaches for sewage in waist-high waders. A clear story about the unglamorous data work that keeps the city’s coastlines safe. — The City
  • [READ] Service design is not user-experience design at greater scale — “Service design gets framed, again and again, as user experience design at greater scale. That framing to me is wrong, wrong, wrong — and the wrongness is consequential.” — Office of Wilson
  • [READ] Matt Zagaja — The Revolution Starts Now — A retrospective on civic tech’s foundational era: building a towed-car notification service in Hartford via open data, then community-building through Code for Boston. Useful reading for anyone wondering how the field got here. — Matt Zagaja
  • [READ] Douglas Rushkoff — The Grid is Not the Ground — “I stopped strategizing, manipulating, and controlling things… I started to trust a different navigational sensibility.” A meditation on attention, agency, and digital-era navigation. — Douglas Rushkoff, LinkedIn
  • [READ] The Web is being made accessible for AI, not people — Jonathan Zong and Frank Elavsky on how accessibility advocacy is being co-opted by the AI-readability push — and what that means for actual disability access. — Tech Policy Press
  • [READ] Rashad Robinson on AI regulation and voting rights — “When states want to protect us, Trump attacks them. When states want to attack us, he protects them… The questions we need to be asking now are about how we reduce the power that holds that corruption of democracy in place, and gain the power to replace it with something that has a very different value system behind it.” — Rashad Robinson, LinkedIn
  • [READ] You don’t need agentic AI — you need agency — A push-back on the “agentic AI” framing that’s been everywhere this spring, arguing the right question is human agency, not autonomous tools. — Life With Machines
  • [LISTEN] IT’S a Tech Podcast — NYS Office of IT Services — A podcast from NYS ITS on the state’s technology programs; useful background for anyone tracking state-level civic-tech investment. — NYS ITS
  • [WATCH] Dr. Alondra Nelson — How to Govern the Future: Artificial Intelligence and the Road Ahead — A talk on AI governance from one of the country’s clearest voices on the topic. — Dr. Alondra Nelson
  • [READ] America’s mental-health care is short-staffed — states can fix it — A Pennsylvania mom waiting six months for a child therapist is the opening; Next City’s piece pulls focus groups from across battleground states to argue states have the tools and the data to staff the system. — Next City
  • [READ] Taxing the rich is possible — a local-leaders toolkit — A Next City toolkit framed around Mayor Mamdani’s pieds-à-terre tax proposal, with case studies on how prior tax increases on the wealthy didn’t actually trigger the predicted exodus. — Next City
  • [READ] Housing First was never meant to be the whole system — Federal behavioral-health funding turmoil — proposed cuts plus new treatment-focused prerequisites tied to homelessness programs — has exposed what Housing First was always missing: the rest of the system. — Next City
  • [READ] For the struggling, hot-spot lending is an internet lifeline — A New Mexico public library’s 10-mobile-broadband-hotspot waiting list is a reminder of the national digital divide — and a clear use case for libraries as digital-equity infrastructure. — GovTech
  • [READ] How the digital economy is changing the business of busking — Gothamist on NYC street performers navigating Venmo, QR codes, and platform tipping — the freedom to innovate meets the freedom to connect on a subway platform. — Gothamist
  • [READ] Mayor Mamdani launches NYC elementary-school math curriculum overhaul — Chancellor Kamar Samuels and Mayor Mamdani are expanding the math initiative former Mayor Eric Adams started — a rare line of continuity across administrations on a data-heavy education effort. — Chalkbeat New York
  • [READ] It’s time for Mayor Mamdani’s charter revision commission — City & State on what a Mamdani-led charter revision should put on the table; a useful framing piece before any commission is named. — City & State NY
  • [READ] Mayor Mamdani’s housing plan, deconstructed — Crain’s on the policy levers, the budget asks, and the politics behind the administration’s first major housing push. — Crain’s New York
  • [READ] Comptroller Levine on AI making the New York story better or worse — A City & State interview with the Comptroller pairing his fiscal-impact report with the political case for AI-aware reserves. — City & State NY
  • [READ] Josh Greenman — experiments index — A working index of small civic-tech experiments and side projects from a long-time civic-tech writer; worth scrolling for ideas about what a one-person civic-tech sketchbook looks like. — Josh Greenman
  • [READ] Disney has effectively erased FiveThirtyEight — Nate Silver on the dismantling of FiveThirtyEight and what the demise of independent quantitative journalism means for civic-information infrastructure. — Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin

Want to sponsor this newsletter or be featured in future ones? Share your community resources, projects, events, and anything else happening so we can feature them in future posts. 

What did you think of today’s newsletter? We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas.

Did a friend forward this to you? There are three ways you can subscribe to our newsletter. Read it on our website, receive it via email, or via LinkedIn!

Take care of each other, and have a great weekend!