Civic Tech Project List
Civic Tech Project List
Build for abundance and progress
Per the post below, I present a list of civic hacking projects that I personally will use for Maximum New York. If you build any of these, you can be assured that they will move our city politics in a more productive direction.
If you want to work on any of these, but don’t know exactly why they’re important or what they are, get in my DMs (here on Substack or on Twitter).
This list is perpetually incomplete (and doesn’t have a hardtech section yet), but it’s a good start.
Civic hacking list
Make a graph of how many rules are adopted by year, broken down by agency (source). You can imagine adding other features and making a pretty web page for this.
See when each provision of the zoning resolution was last amended, make it into a pretty visualization (source).
Make podcasts for:
All city council committee hearings
Just one committee (you could make the “tech committee podcast”)
State legislature committee hearings
Just one state legislature committee (you could make the Assembly “housing committee podcast”)
Pull all PDF transcripts from NYC Council and arrange them on a webpage (someone is working on this, but maybe you want to join!)
Web app for community board parliamentary bootcamps: parliamentary procedure motion standard descriptive characteristics, look up quickly (include citations to Robert’s Rules 12th ed and In Brief).
Talk to it via chat bot? I can imagine many different interfaces for this. It could also be expanded to include other things like agendas that would come up frequently.
The goal here: a meeting chair should be able to have their laptop open, and with one or two keystrokes pull up the type of thing they’re dealing with.
Make many different map visualizations by City Council district and Community District:
Votes (primary versus general in each year)
Number of applicants (Community boards)
Where do bills come from (introduced and enacted)
Tag bills by subject matter, or list them out
Participatory budgeting votes
Infinite things to visualize for the City Council internally, like committee composition, voting rates, attendance, committee meeting rates, and more (one person is working on this, but they could always use friends)
City Council tech committee webpage with all information about that committee (historical and contemporary):
Calendar
Transcripts
Podcast/video stream of hearings
Attachments (any bills, reports, testimonies, etc)
Graphics on committee composition (by borough, district, etc)
Experimental and possibly lots of work? Using one Community Board’s bylaws, create a template of a set that are kept in a repo. The goal is to create a standard bylaw format, where changes are tracked directly. The purpose of this explicitly isn’t to be rolled out, but for research. Figure out things that work, things that don’t. How can we have a standard format that will actually be useful to CB chairs and members?
Make this list into a public project tracker that shows who’s working on what!
Let me know if you want to work on any of these, or if you have ideas you want to bounce off a govmech person (me!).