Newsletter
Donate
Blue graphic titled 'This week in NYC's #CivicTech! Week 33 of 2026.' Highlights include a thank-you for attending BetaBagels 016 with the PIT Crew, CityCamp NYC early-bird tickets, the August 20 Civic Tech Summer Showcase, and new city jobs and community events.

This week in NYC’s #CivicTech – August 13, 2026

,

Gabrielle Langston

Thank you to everyone who came out to BetaBagels 016! It was a full room for OTI’s Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, the embedded team of product managers, designers, engineers, user researchers, and data experts now working alongside city agencies to build digital public services. Keep an eye out for a full recap soon.

Speaking of full rooms, if you’ve been meaning to grab tickets to CityCamp NYC on September 19 at Hunter College, now is the time. Early bird pricing is live, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. Register at citycamp.nyc before the price ticks up.

While you’re at it: know New Yorkers whose work is making the city more transparent, more accountable, or more open? Nominate them for a BetaNYC 2026 Civic Innovator Award, which will be presented at CityCamp NYC.

One more date to save: next Thursday, August 20, is the Civic Tech Summer Showcase, where our BetaBuilders spend the summer building and get one evening to show off what they made. If you want a sense of what BetaNYC’s community builds, this is the night to see it!

Whether it’s CityCamp, the Showcase, or the next BetaBagels, we hope to see you there. Let’s keep building together!

— Gabrielle Langston & Noel Hidalgo

Support BetaNYC

  • See what our BetaBuilders have been building this summer — Swing by the Civic Tech Summer Showcase on August 20, where our BetaBuilders community shows off the projects they’ve spent the summer building. Becoming a BetaBuilder is how you keep the programs, events, and this newsletter running the rest of the year. – beta.nyc/donate

Upcoming Events with BetaNYC

Civic Tech News & Updates

  • NYC Council Investigates Prediction Market Platforms Over Deceptive Marketing — The Council announced an investigation into deceptive and predatory marketing practices by prediction market platforms operating in the city. – NYC Council
  • State Democratic Party Files Complaint Over Blakeman’s Use of AI in Campaign Ads — NYS Democrats allege the gubernatorial campaign used undisclosed generative AI in videos and social content, including a fabricated South Park–style clip, without the disclosure state law requires for synthetic media. – City & State New York
  • State Comptroller: New York’s Recycling Data Is “A Dumpster Fire” — A DiNapoli audit found the DEC lacks reliable recycling data, with roughly a third of required facility reports missing and unverified figures spanning 2021–2023. – Gothamist
  • Governor Hochul Launches $60M Selection Process for Regional Quantum Technology Hubs — Four regional hubs will compete for state funding to grow New York’s quantum economy and create jobs. – Governor Kathy Hochul — News
  • Empire AI Beta Goes Fully Online at SUNY Buffalo — The state-funded AI supercomputer is now running at full capacity, with 300+ research projects queued and federal officials pointing to it as a model for regional AI infrastructure. – Governor Kathy Hochul — News

AI Roundup

  • DeepMind Says Its AI Can Predict Hurricanes Earlier Than Anyone Else — WeatherNext forecasts storm track and intensity from lower-resolution data and will be open-sourced, though researchers don’t yet fully understand how it works. – WIRED
  • Cory Doctorow: The People Who Tell You “AI Is Changing Everything” Are Lying — A look at the gap between executives’ public claims about AI’s business impact and the negligible results researchers are actually finding. – The Nerve

Community Wins, and Featured Tools

  • BetaNYC Gets a Shoutout in a New Op-Ed on AI and Government Transparency — Citizens Union’s Searchlight publication credits BetaNYC’s AI tools and citywide AI literacy classes as examples of what it looks like to make government understandable, alongside a look at the MyCity Chatbot. – Dominic Ramos-Ruiz, Searchlight (Citizens Union)
  • A Reader-Built Subway Data Tool Worth Exploring — subway.fyi turns months of recorded transit data into an explorable public dataset. – subway.fyi
  • Council Member Gale Brewer’s Interns Are Doing Real Civic Data Collection — For years, her office has sent student interns to survey tree canopies, broken fountains, storefront vacancies, and unlicensed cannabis shops block by block across District 6. – City & State New York
  • New Yorkers Turn AI-Ad Fatigue Into Public Art at West 4th Street — After parody ads mocking a citywide surge in subway AI advertising went viral, riders built their own fake tech ads at a station installation. – Gothamist
  • A Housing Nonprofit’s Building-Distress Database Turns 20 — UNHP’s Building Indicator Project tracks 120+ data points across all 70,000+ NYC rental buildings to flag physical and financial distress, marking its 20th annual lender roundtable. – University Neighborhood Housing Program

Jobs & Opportunities

Events

Media to Watch, Listen, or Read

  • [LISTEN] AI Bias and Data Equity with Heather Krause — A vendor-agnostic nonprofit-tech podcast episode with We All Count’s Heather Krause on where bias creeps into data work. – Community IT Innovators
  • [READ] NYCHA Tenants Sue Over Police Access to Surveillance Cameras — A lawsuit accuses NYPD and NYCHA of using a free internet program to covertly give police access to public housing surveillance cameras. – City Limits
  • [READ] Hackers Just Broke Into America’s Tap Water. How Scared Should You Be? — A look at how exposed U.S. municipal water infrastructure is, after a likely Iranian hack hit water systems in a dozen states. – Vox
  • [READ] Volunteer Groups Help Maintain NYC Parks as Budget Remains Flat — With the parks budget stuck around 0.05% of the city’s $127B budget, volunteers have become essential to keeping green space running. – Gothamist
  • [READ] The Color Recession May Be Permanent — A look at how risk-aversion has drained color from homes, cars, and everyday products — read here as a civic-design story about the shared visual environment, not just consumer taste. – The Atlantic
  • [READ] USA Today Co. Partners With Palantir to Analyze Audience Data — The 200+-paper newspaper chain is using Palantir’s AI platform to convert reader behavior into first-party data as search traffic falls. – Nieman Journalism Lab
  • [READ] Digital Connectivity Landscapes in the Southeastern United States — A deep dive into how the digital divide has evolved from a binary access question into a mix of infrastructure quality, affordability, and literacy. – Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
  • [READ] Inside New York’s Multistate Lawsuit Over Sharing TANF Data — AG Letitia James joined other states suing to block a federal rule allowing agencies to share welfare recipients’ personal data. – NEWS10 ABC
  • [READ] What Happens When Speed Cameras Get Shut Off — After Ontario banned automated traffic enforcement, data shows a surge in speeding — a natural experiment relevant to NYC’s own camera program. Note: paywalled. – Bloomberg CityLab

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

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.

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!

We use AI tools to help scan and organize civic tech news each week — all editorial decisions are made by the BetaNYC team, per our AI Policy.

Build with NYC’s civic data. BetaNYC publishes free, open-source MCP connectors giving AI assistants direct access to NYC Council legislation, city spending and contracts, Council discretionary funding, 311 service data, the City Record, the NYC Charter and Administrative Code, and NYS Open Legislation. If you’re building with AI and civic data, explore them on GitHub.

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

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