Newsletter
Donate
Banner announcing NYC #CivicTech Week 23 of 2026 with four bullet items about BetaBuilders, Pride Tech Night, a hearing, and Charter Explorer data.

This week in NYC’s #CivicTech – June 5, 2026

,

Gabby Langston

Three things this week worth your attention, and your action.

First, we launched BetaBuilders, our new community membership program. It’s a way for New Yorkers who believe in open data, civic technology, and a city that works for everyone to directly fuel this work. Every contribution goes to the programs we build our week around: School of Data, Mapping for Equity, our AI literacy workshops, and this newsletter. Join the BetaBuilders community with a contribution today and help power our work through 2026. Borough Builders who contribute $26 per month will receive a BetaNYC sticker pack, members-only event invitations, exclusive annual swag, and discounted tickets to select BetaNYC events.

Next, come celebrate with us at BetaBuilders: Pride Tech Night on Tuesday, June 23. We’re gathering at Wilka’s (241 Bowery, NYC) for Pride-focused lightning talks, a special announcement, and an evening with NYC’s civic tech community. This is our official launch party, and we’d love to see you there! Tickets are $30 and include two drink tickets.

Finally, on Thursday, June 11, Mayor Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) will hold a public hearing on modernizing government technology at Brooklyn Law School from 5pm–8pm. As part of the Charter Revision Commission process, this hearing is a real opportunity to shape how the city’s foundational document gets updated for the digital age. You don’t have to be an expert to testify. Show up. Share your experience with city services. Talk about what works and what doesn’t. RSVP by this Friday.

Also in this issue: the NYC Public Advocate’s “Internet for All” plan, Josh Greenman’s NYC Charter Explorer (built on BetaNYC’s open data!), job listings, and a full slate of upcoming events. Enjoy!

— Gabrielle Langston & Jordan Shapiro

Introducing BetaBuilders! 💗

  • BetaBuilders is live — join us — BetaBuilders is our new community membership program: a direct way to sustain the open-data advocacy, civic-tech programming, and community work you see in this newsletter every week. School of Data, Mapping for Equity, and our AI literacy workshops run because people like you show up. Contribute $26 to help us sustain it all through 2026. — beta.nyc/donate

Upcoming Events with BetaNYC 🎊

⭐ Urgent: Show Up for NYC’s Charter Revision

Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) — Public Hearing on Government Technology Thursday, June 11 at 5:00–8:00pm · Brooklyn Law School, 250 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn

Mayor Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency is holding a public hearing focused on modernizing government and streamlining government technology. COGE is part of the Mayor’s Charter Revision Commission — an effort to update NYC’s foundational document to cut red tape and deliver results faster.

You don’t need to be an expert to testify. Share your experience with city government. Talk about what works and what doesn’t. RSVP by Friday if possible.

Civic Tech News & Updates 🗽

  • NYC Public Advocate maps out an “Internet for All” plan — The Public Advocate’s office wants to treat internet access as a public utility — faster, more reliable, and reaching lower-income neighborhoods first. — GovTech
  • The volunteer race to rescue federal data before it disappears — More than 800 librarians, coders, and retirees have archived 3,000+ at-risk government datasets — climate, health, LGBTQ+ records — on the principle that “public data should be a public good.” — The Guardian
  • New York lawmakers move to pause new data centers for a year — The Legislature is advancing a one-year moratorium on new data center construction, a significant tech-infrastructure policy move that will shape where AI workloads land in the state. — Politico
  • New York clears the way for balcony solar — The Solar Up Now NY Act would let apartment dwellers plug in portable panels up to 1,200 watts without utility pre-approval; awaiting Governor Hochul’s signature. — Gothamist
  • Politico looks at NY-12’s “AI guy” voting record on tech — Politico

AI Roundup 🤖

  • Maryland opens an AI Innovation Lab for state agencies — Governor Wes Moore’s IT department will give agencies testing environments and expert support for AI projects; one early fleet-management agent is projected to save the state $1–1.5M a year. — Office of Governor Wes Moore
  • Empire AI cuts a drug-discovery cycle from months to days — New York’s public-private university supercomputing consortium has compressed drug-discovery iterations from six-to-eight months down to six days. — City & State New York

Community Wins, and Featured Tools 🛠️

  • BetaNYC’s open Charter data is powering a new public tool — Josh Greenman built a searchable, filterable, annotatable explorer for the full NYC Charter — and it runs entirely on BetaNYC’s machine-readable Charter, Administrative Code & Rules open data. Search by keyword, highlight provisions, navigate the full text. This is exactly the kind of civic tool our open data work is meant to enable. — Josh Greenman
  • Do you work for state or local government? Take Public Servant Pulse — An annual survey from The People Lab at Harvard Kennedy School seeking to understand the experiences and challenges of public employees across the US. Findings inform workforce policy. Your voice matters here. — Take the survey
  • A Bronx resident built a tool to hold landlords accountable for broken elevators — Karl Johnson’s Elevator Advocate uses NYC Open Data to identify residential buildings with chronic elevator outages — 1+ complaint in the past year, 3+ over three years — across NYC Council districts. Johnson is testifying before the NYC Council Committee on Aging on June 16 on interagency coordination for elevator-dependent seniors. — Elevator Advocate
  • CUNY’s AI Lab opens up AI infrastructure for the public university — The Graduate Center–based CUNY AI Lab runs a privacy-first model sandbox, transcription and OCR tools, and open teaching resources — including vibe-coding workshops — for faculty, staff, and students across CUNY. — CUNY AI Lab
  • A people’s timeline of American surveillance — Solidarity Over Surveillance maps surveillance in America from 1700s lantern laws through COINTELPRO to today’s AI-powered tools, and connects visitors to local advocacy. — Solidarity Over Surveillance
  • Hack Your Summer 2026: a free civic-tech sprint for student builders — A free 4-week virtual sprint for US college students and recent grads to build real, public-facing projects — software, data science, civic policy, journalism. Partnered with Coding it Forward. Two sessions: June 15 and July 13. — Hack Your Summer

Jobs & Opportunities 💼

Events 📅

Media to Watch, Listen, or Read 🎥

  • [READ] How U.S. cities lost the thread on economic development — An essay tracing how the Robert Moses model of top-down urban renewal gave way to austerity logic — and what the Jane Jacobs alternative actually demands of city leaders today. — Next City
  • [READ] Trans New Yorkers sue to block the Trump administration’s access to healthcare records — A class-action suit seeks to prevent NYU Langone Health from turning over records on minors who received gender-affirming care in response to a DOJ subpoena. — Gothamist
  • [READ] AI agents are quietly crawling sites to catalog their tools — “So far, the most interesting pattern in our MCP server logs isn’t queries from users. It’s the steady trickle of agents crawling sites purely to see what MCP tools are exposed.” — Hacks/Hackers
  • [READ] A lo-fi rebellion against AI — As machine-made visuals flood every feed, artists and designers are leaning into the scrawled, the handmade, and the deliberately imperfect — anything that signals a human made it. — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker
  • [READ] The privacy cost built into generative AI — Amnesty International argues the data pipelines behind major AI systems rely on mass, nonconsensual web scraping — “mass invasions of privacy by design” that land hardest on marginalized communities. — Amnesty International
  • [READ] Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI and human dignity — Magnifica Humanitas frames artificial intelligence as a moral test, calling for a “civilization of love” over a new Tower of Babel of unchecked technological power. — The Vatican
  • [READ] A skeptical read on Hochul’s budget “victory” — “If budgets are indeed ‘moral documents,’ the governor and the state legislature are in trouble.” — Christopher Robbins — Hell Gate
  • [READ] A federal judge halts the dismantling of a major climate-research center — A court blocked the NSF from handing off the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, calling the move “arbitrary and capricious” and warning of brain drain and weaker weather forecasting. — Eos
  • [READ] Former NASA astronauts launch a pro-democracy group — More than 100 retired astronauts have formed Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan group promoting the rule of law, peaceful transfers of power, and “evidence-based leadership.” — Scientific American

BetaNYC is a civic organization improving lives through civic technology, design, and open data. Join our Slack · Subscribe to the newsletter · Support our work · Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, and YouTube.