• BetaNYC Supports Int. 1137-2018 – Codifying MODA into the City Charter

    Earlier this week, the NYC Technology Committee voted in favor of Int. 1137-2018 (introduced by Council Member Adrienne E. Adams), which would codify the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA) into the City Charter.  BetaNYC strongly supports the legislation. MODA was created through Mayor Bloomberg’s Executive Order 306. Since then the Office has played a pivotal…

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  • BetaNYC’s Testimony to New York City Council on Open Data and Int. No. 1137 of 2018

    To: NY City Council – Committee on Technology From: Lindsay Poirier, Ph.D., Lab Manager Re: 2018 Open Data Hearing and Testimony in support of Int. No. 1137-2018 Thursday, 18 October 2018 Chair Koo and members of the New York City Council Technology Committee, My name is Lindsay Poirier, and I am the Lab Manager at…

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  • Executive Summary Report on Community Board Technology and Information Workflows

    We have published two reports based on several years of research into the technical and information infrastructure supporting community boards. The first report, BetaNYC and Civic Innovations Fellows Community Board and Technology Needs Report, summarizes interviews with district managers about the current state of technology within district offices and their most pressing technology needs going forward.…

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  • Call for Community Board Data Success Stories and Data Needs Use Cases

      We are conducting research to better understand the information infrastructure that supports community boards and are producing recommendations on how to make municipal information more useful! Can you give us five mins and tell us your successes and/or data needs?   For the last three months, we have documented the existing information workflows within community…

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  • Scraping Data about Manhattan’s Licensed Beauty Salons and Barbershops

    At BetaNYC, we have been working on a tool to map vacant storefronts in Manhattan. Since there is currently no city entity comprehensively tracking the location or status of vacant storefronts across the city, we are attempting to reverse engineer this data by mapping where there are commercial units in the city and then removing…

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