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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…
