Mayor Adams unveils the MyCity portal (photo: Caroline Willis/Mayoral Photo Office)

Mayor Eric Adams began to fulfill one of his major campaign promises in March as he launched the “MyCity” online portal that promises to help New Yorkers more easily apply for public benefits and access city services. The platform — which Adams calls "a legacy project" — is in its infancy, currently only providing access to childcare applications, but is meant to grow into a one-stop-shop for many if not all interactions with city government.

But civic technologists say that the administration’s approach

MyCity (photo: @nycgov)

When Bill de Blasio took office as Mayor in 2014, everyone knew government information technology agencies needed significant reform but didn’t know how exactly to do it. His predecessor, Mayor Bloomberg, was a venerated technology executive who had a hugely embarrassing software development fiasco calledCity Time

Mayor Adams sees tech jobs in action (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

It's now clear that predictions of economic doom for New York made in the early days of the pandemic were as far off as, well, forecasts of the city’s demise made after 9/11 and the Great Recession. But while there are numerous signs that the city is bouncing back strong—from an uptick in tourism to sky-high demand for apartments—New York still has a long way to go in its employment recovery. Indeed, the city still has 123,000 fewer jobs than it did in February 2020, regaining

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)

Now that New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams’ long-shot campaign for New York Governor is over, he presumably has more time to focus on performing the functions that the New York City Charter assigns to his elected office.

One function he has yet to perform, but something all previous Public Advocates have done, is to convene a meeting of the Commission on Public Information and Communication (COPIC). There’s never been a better time for him

Mayor Adams visits a small business (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

One of Mayor Eric Adams’ main gripes with city government is that it is too inefficient, part of rampant dysfunction that exacerbates inequality and stifles growth. There’s far too much red tape and redundancy between city agencies and New Yorkers looking to them for services, the new mayor says. And he’s vowed to ease that access by launching an online portal that will allow people to apply for city benefits, services, and permits at the touch of a button.

When he was running for mayor, Adams proposed to

Participatory government in-person (photo: New York City Council)

In 2019, New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly in favor of establishing a Civic Engagement Commission that would modernize how the city and its residents worked together to identify and solve problems at the most local levels. That commission hasn’t been earning itself many headlines, but the participation platform it set up atparticipate.nyc.gov...

NYC CTO Matthew Fraser with Mayor Adams (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

The de Blasio administration acknowledged that New York City desperately needs a Digital Service Organization (DSO) when it announced less than a month before the mayor left office that it wants to hire people for a new “NYC Digital Services” unit that would apply best practices in modern, open-source software development to New York City’s many

NYC Department of Information Information Technology and Telecommunications Github profile

New York City’s civic technology community has for many years been calling on city government to establish a Digital Service Organization (DSO). DSOs are technology groups organized within government agenies that use open source software to create their own technology solutions instead of buying proprietary services from

Eric Adams (photo: Erica Sherman/Brooklyn BP's Office)

Eric Adams believes government inefficiency is at the root of many ills that plague New Yorkers. The ineffective delivery of public services and waste of taxpayer dollars, he says, create the very inequality and suffering that city government is meant to ameliorate.

For years leading up to and throughout his run for mayor this year, Adams -- the two-term Brooklyn borough president and

Mayor de Blasio at Cornell Tech (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)

A report released Wednesday provides technological solutions for some of the city’s myriad problems and examines the barriers to their adoption, with the hope of provoking intense debate about urban technology in this year’s municipal election. 

The 124-page report, titled “Rebooting NYC: An Urban Tech Agenda for the Next Administration,” is a first draft released by Cornell Tech’s

Cornell Tech (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photography Office)

With New York City’s political landscape on the verge of drastic change, urban technology experts at Cornell Tech, the graduate school based on Roosevelt Island, are looking to make sure that the new class of city officials elected this year will embrace technology-based solutions to the city’s longstanding challenges.

Cornell Tech’s Urban Tech Hub, which is part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and conducts applied research, helps create startups, and

Mayor de Blasio at a LinkNYC kiosk (photo: Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

As the pandemic forced New Yorkers to shelter at home, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration launched several efforts to assist those who lacked the necessary access to the internet to adapt to working and learning virtually. But there remains a deep digital divide across the city, particularly in terms of lack of access in low-income communities of color, creating significant challenges for students, residents of homeless shelters and public housing, and others.

According to city data, 40%

(SimCity image via nycj blogspot)

I was eight years old when I first encountered a computer game called SimCity. The general premise of the game was that you were the mayor of a virtual city, and you would use game money to create a place for communities of “Sims” to live.

First you set up basic infrastructure like roads, pipes, and zoning and soon

(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

When Jeff Novich wanted to report a honking taxi outside his apartment in 2014, he did what most New Yorkers do when making noise complaints. He filed an online report with 311.

It was the start of an ongoing relationship with the now 16-year-old city service, which in 2018 handled over 20,000 daily phone calls and 3 million individual reports equaling more than 44 million interactions in total. The service’s 400-plus employees handle everything from noise complaints to dispensing daily

Corey Johnson, Laurie Cumbo, Tish James (photo: Emil Cohen/City Council)

A charter-mandated city commission meant to help New Yorkers access information about their government sputtered to a stop in 2016 owing to a lack of funding, barely three years after being revived by former Public Advocate Letitia James. Now, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is also acting public advocate for the next several weeks, is taking up James’ unfinished business and attempting to raise the commission from its grave.

The Commission on

(photo via NYC Planning)

New York City and its neighbors have a problem. Unlike Los Angeles, Chicago, and the other major U.S. metropolitan areas that fit neatly within the standard city, county, and state political boundaries, our metropolitan area of over 22 million people does not. We’re spread out over four states and 26 counties, five of which are called “boroughs” and were integrated together to create our city over 100 years ago.

All these complex boundaries and jurisdictions have resulted in a metropolitan area that has been “divided and

(photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

Smartphones are transforming transit in cities all over the world, and city governments are struggling to figure out how to best manage the change. If the world was looking to New York City’s recently enacted legislation affecting for-hire vehicle companies, then there will be disappointment given that, once again, the city’s political establishment decided to impose an outdated regulatory regime on innovative firms,

NYC Planning Labs, a new unit in the Department of City Planning introduced on Monday, is a next step in both civic technology and city planning. Planning Labs will use open platforms that will engage people outside of city government, but largely work to provide tools to others at City Planning, so they can find solutions to the city’s planning challenges as New York continues to grow and the de Blasio administration moves ahead with its affordable housing, community development, and other initiatives.

The new effort intends to “bring civic data to life through

Council Member Vacca (photo: @JamesVacca13)

There are two years to go before the deadline set by the city’s 2012 Open Data Law, which requires city agencies identify and publish all their citywide aggregated public data online. At a Wednesday afternoon oversight hearing of the City Council’s Committee on Technology, open data and civic technology advocates offered praise for the city’s progress thus far and recommendations for the city to meet its goals.

Open data is considered a vital transparency