New York City has launched the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew: five in-house teams of product managers, designers, engineers, user researchers, and data experts building digital solutions to public problems. The more than $5 million initiative includes one crew supported by The Rockefeller Foundation through the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City. BetaNYC has called for this in-house capacity for over a decade, and the broader push for stronger public-technology infrastructure reaches back further still, to the open-government community from which BetaNYC grew.
New Yorkers deserve government technology that meets their needs, where they are. Today’s investment strengthens the city’s capacity to deliver on housing, child care, worker and consumer protection, and affordability. Government technology should always serve people first, and by building in-house teams that deliver faster and more cost-effectively, this investment does exactly that. We commend Mayor Mamdani and his team for this investment and look forward to working with the administration to improve how the city delivers its data and digital services.
— Noel Hidalgo, Executive Director, BetaNYC
Watch: the launch announcement
Why this matters: BetaNYC’s road to in-house digital services
The case for an in-house team is not new. New Yorkers have been building toward this moment for more than ten years. Here is the throughline, in order.
- 2013 — The People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City. BetaNYC’s community-authored framework called for the city to build digital services that serve residents first, with the in-house capacity to keep those services current. Link: nycroadmap.us
- May 9, 2016 — Support for the city’s Digital Services Playbook. BetaNYC publicly backed New York’s move toward standardized, user-centered digital services, an early marker of the in-house approach the city is now staffing. Read the statement
- January 13, 2021 — Working sessions with NYC Digital Service. At BetaBagels 007, BetaNYC hosted a briefing with the Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, featuring Katherine Benjamin, then Deputy CTO for Digital Services. The conversation centered on what a resourced, in-house digital service team could do for New Yorkers. Watch the session
- February 17, 2021 — Testimony on the city’s COVID-19 vaccine websites. As New Yorkers struggled to book vaccine appointments, BetaNYC testified before the NYC Council’s Joint Committee on Health, Technology, and Aging that the rollout was “a complete failure of service design,” the result of the city not deploying its own designers and technologists when residents needed them most. BetaNYC urged the Council to empower an in-house civic service-design studio and product team to build a centralized, accessible vaccination portal for every New Yorker. The pandemic made the human cost of thin in-house digital capacity impossible to ignore. Read the testimony
- March 23, 2022 — Testimony at the DoITT/OTI budget hearing. BetaNYC testified on the city’s technology budget, pressing for the agency capacity and in-house talent needed to deliver digital services to New Yorkers. Read the testimony
- November 18, 2025 — “Dear Mayor-Elect: 8 Gov-Tech Ideas.” BetaNYC’s first two recommendations to the incoming administration named this directly. Idea #1: “Empower OTI with a clear mandate around improving digital service delivery across agencies.” Idea #2: “Scale NYC Digital Service and prioritize service design roles embedded with line agencies.” Read the 8 ideas
- February 13, 2026 — BetaNYC’s 2025 impact report. Our year-end report documented a year of civic-tech programming and advocacy, including the continued case for building the city’s digital-service capacity in-house rather than renting it from vendors. Read the report
- March 19, 2026 — Testimony at the Council’s preliminary budget hearing. BetaNYC testified to the NYC Council on the technology budget, pressing for investment in the city’s in-house digital-service and service-design capacity. Read the testimony
- June 10, 2026 — Joint testimony at the Council’s executive budget hearing. BetaNYC joined partners in budget testimony to the NYC Council, continuing to make the case for funding the city’s digital services and the teams that build them. Read the testimony
- June 11, 2026 — Anchoring digital sovereignty at the Commission on Government Efficiency. BetaNYC Associate Board Manager Jordan Shapiro testified before the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE). Their testimony was incorporated into the Commission’s preliminary report, which anchors digital sovereignty in its technology recommendations and echoes the call for a unified, citywide digital service team. BetaNYC’s COGE testimony · COGE preliminary report (PDF) · Press release
- July 8, 2026 — Open data as public infrastructure, and the first hires. BetaNYC released nearly twenty years of NYC Council budget data as machine-readable open data, showing what durable, in-house data capacity looks like in practice. Days later, OTI posted a full internal product team, a Senior Product Manager, a Senior Product Engineer, and a Senior Product Designer, inside the division that runs 311, NYC.gov, and dozens of resident-facing tools. Read about the budget project
What the PIT Crew is
OTI will deploy five PIT Crews. The first partners with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to build an online portal for New Yorkers to file complaints against hard-to-cancel subscriptions, supporting the city’s “Click to Cancel” protections. Three more will advance the administration’s affordability agenda, and a fifth is supported by The Rockefeller Foundation through the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City. Each crew pairs product managers, designers, engineers, user researchers, and data experts with City agencies to move from idea to launched tool in months rather than years.
The City describes the teams as its “Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew … building digital public goods for New Yorkers, in-house,” with the goal of making “interacting with government dignified and delightful for every New Yorker.” The city is hiring now for three roles, 15 positions in all. Technologists can apply at nyc.gov/pitcrew.
More from BetaNYC
Stay in the loop. Every week, BetaNYC publishes The Message, our roundup of “This week in NYC’s #CivicTech.” It covers the events, jobs, datasets, and policy moves shaping a more open and accountable New York, and it is free. Subscribe at beta.nyc/newsletter.
Explore our Tools for Democracy. BetaNYC builds free, open-source digital democracy tools that turn New York’s foundational civic data into plain-language answers. Our Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers let a resident, journalist, or community board member ask precise questions of the city’s laws, legislation, spending, and procurement, and get sourced answers without going through a vendor’s interface. The newest, BetaNYC/New-York-City-Budget, turns two decades of Council budget PDFs into open data. See the full set at beta.nyc/ai-tools-for-nyc-democracy.