BetaNYC aims to improve civic technology and open data usage in New York City. The organization partners with New York’s borough president offices and the 59 community boards under them, focusing on how better use of technology and access to data can improve on-the-ground decision-making at a hyper-local scale. Among many other activities, BetaNYC runs a Civic Innovation Fellows program, which puts CUNY undergraduates to work identifying and addressing technology needs at borough president offices and community boards; offers open data training to municipal government workers; developed an open data dashboard to allow community board members to quickly and intuitively access relevant data, like the number and type of complaints received; and has launched several new software tools to inform community-level issues like liquor licensing or tenant disputes. Funds from this grant provide two years of operational support for BetaNYC.

Devoted to cultivating the community of software engineers living in and around New York City, hackNY runs community-building hackathons as well as a marquee summer fellowship that combines internships with networking and cohort training in practical career skills. As a complement to summer intern programs run by Google and Facebook, the hackNY internship program specifically works with start-up companies that do not have the resources to run their own efforts. Funds from this grant provide operational support for hackNY for two years.

Founded by civic technologist Noel Hidalgo, BetaNYC is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping key New York City constituencies take advantage of already-accessible open civic data. Hidalgo has identified New York’s borough president offices and community boards as particularly promising sites of leverage where better access to civic data could be of direct and immediate value to local governance, and where better technical literacy and capacity could tangibly improve New Yorkers’ experience of government. Among its programs, BetaNYC runs a Community Information Fellowship that places CUNY undergraduates in the Manhattan Borough President’s office, where they identify and work to fill gaps in technical expertise at the community board. This grant would build on that program to pilot a “Civic Innovation Lab” in the Borough President’s office that will build prototype solutions to data problems identified by these fellows. The grant is being made to the Fund for the City of New York, a not-for-profit that provides fiscal sponsorship and administrative support to charitable efforts aimed at benefiting the City and its residents.