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NYC’s DOE AI Ban? Here Is What the Policy Actually Says.
On September 2, New York City paused generative AI for nearly 600,000 public school students. We read the announcement, the press conference transcript, the March guidance that preceded it, and the parent organizing that forced it — then went back through nearly 10 years of our own conversations, because we have been writing about automated…
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We are building a better tomorrow today: our impact in 2026, what we made, argued for, and won
Building civic infrastructure is never a thing you ever finish. The City we want to see will always be under construction. Bit by byte, we are at a unique moment in history with the tools, resources, and hope to address systemic issues and injustice, yet continuing to face the uncertainty of authoritarianism and climate change.…
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We Turned Two Decades of Council Budget PDFs Into Open Data. Now the City Should Maintain The Data.
Intro New Yorkers have wanted to see where their tax dollars go for a very long time. In 1907, reformers founded the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, and the following year it staged a “Budget Exhibit” that laid the city’s spending out for ordinary residents to walk through and question. The idea behind it,…
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New digital democracy tools for AI — MCPs for the Charter/Laws, Council, the City Record, and Checkbook
New Amsterdam’s Open Government History The argument about who controls what the public knows about its government is not a recent one in New York. It goes back to 1649. That year, Adriaen van der Donck — a Dutch lawyer and president of the Nine Men, the colonists’ advisory body to Director-General Stuyvesant — went…
