Building an AI-Powered Knowledge Base for NYC Community Boards

nycsodata26.sched.com #nycSOdata #opendataweek

Tal Roded, NYCuriosity Author & Manhattan CB3 Member

Sarah Sachs, Block Party Founder

Major Contribution from McKay Warren

Have you ever attended a Community Board Meeting?

Most folks we ask, typically respond with a confused look...

Have you ever attended a community board meeting? I see some nods in the virtual crowd, it looks like some of us have attended, but maybe not as much as we would like. while some of us have attended these meetings, why are they important?

Why are Community Boards important?

local

Community boards produce more structured civic data than almost any other level of government.

Community boards discuss policies, initiatives, priorities which impact our day to day lives. They act as the community’s voice when brokering conversations with state and local governments, non profit agencies and other organizations. In a nutshell, they are the most local level of democracy, and making them more accessible strengthens the representation of the community.

How might technology be used to help make local democracy more accessible?

It can be said that democracy is not a spectator sport, and to become engaged in democracy we must be informed. Encourage people to actually attend community board meetings, being informed can help be engaged - to know what is being discussed in the meetings, to speak up as a public member, or even to vote as a public member Technology can help with this process of being informed

Our Story - Cheers to the NYC Civic Tech Community!

Oliver - on NYC OTI

Why Manhattan Community Board 3?

MCB3 covers the Lower East Side and East Village — one of NYC’s most politically active districts.

· Heavy docket of liquor licensing, land use, and housing issues · Well-documented minutes going back to 2002 · No centralization or database of minutes or resolutions - individual PDFs

School of Data Agenda

Part 1: What are community boards and why do they matter?

Part 2: What is the opportunity for civic technology?

Demo time

Q&A

PART ONE

What Are NYC Community Boards
and Why Do They Matter?

The Local Layer of NYC Government Most People Don’t Know Exists

Community boards are the ground floor of New York City politics—and most New Yorkers have never heard of them.

· 59 community boards across NYC’s 5 boroughs

· Established by the NYC Charter

· Represent a single community district — neighborhood scale

· Members are uncompensated volunteers appointed by their Borough President to serve two-year terms

· Charter Mandate: “consider the needs of the community district and advise elected officials”

The key fact:

Community boards have NO formal decision-making power.

Their role is advisory.

So why do they matter? →

Soft Power — Why “Advisory” Doesn’t Mean Toothless

▶

Resolutions on the record

Every agency and elected official sees when CB formally opposes their project. Ignoring a unanimous board vote can have political costs.

▶

District Needs Statement (DNS)

Annual priorities document filed by each CB. City agencies must respond to DNS requests in budget planning — direct budget influence.

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Required ULURP referrals, SLA & sidewalk cafe applications

For major land use decisions (rezonings, new developments), the city is legally required to refer applications to the CB. Recommendations become public record.

▶

Political pipeline

Many City Council members began as CB members. Relationships here open doors in elected offices and city agencies.

BetaNYC Boundaries Map

How Community Boards Are Structured

Who’s on the board:

· Up to 50 volunteer members

· 2-year terms (max 4 consecutive)

· No salary, no formal qualifications

· Only requirement: Must live, work, or have significant interest in the district

Leadership & staff:

· Chair, Vice-Chairs, Secretary,
Treasurer (elected by members)

· One paid District Manager, optional additional non-member staff

Subject-matter Committees:

· Transportation · Parks · SLA

· Land Use · Landmarks · Housing

· Health · Youth & Education

What Is a Resolution?

Resolutions are official, written, public positions on a local issue.

Standard resolution format:

TITLE: One-sentence summary

WHEREAS, [context and reasoning]...

WHEREAS, [additional context]...

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED,

that Community Board 3 [action]...

MCB3 votes on:

· Bar & restaurant liquor licenses

· Traffic safety improvements

· Real estate developments

· City agency requests
(repaving, tree planting…)

· City-wide policy positions

tee up the tool here - but they're not accessible...

Partial text of a Manhattan CB3 resolution from the Transportation Committee. Note the succinct title and series of WHEREAS clauses (which continue past the end of this image). [source]

Two Kinds of Community Board Meetings

Full Board Meetings

Monthly · Open to the public

· Public comment period (~2 min per person)

· Elected officials give reports

· Committees report resolutions

· Full Board votes on resolutions

Committee Meetings

(Usually) Monthly · (Usually) Open to the public

· Agencies present project details

· Resolutions drafted and debated by committees

· Where advocacy is most effective

· Where the real work happens

Advocate insight: By the time a resolution reaches the full board, the debate is mostly over. Show up to committee meetings.

The Information Problem

Community boards are officially transparent — but practically opaque.

✅ What exists

· All meetings open to the public

· All resolutions and votes recorded publicly

· Minutes posted as PDFs or on Airtable on individual community board websites

· PDFs (for MCB3) go back to 2002

❌ What’s missing

· No structured database

· No search across resolutions

· No way to track a topic or location
across 20 years of minutes

· No way to identify contested issues

· 268 siloed PDFs (for MCB3)

Table from the Office of the Manhattan Borough President

Community Board member term limits begin in 2027 - is local government prepared for the significant loss of institutional knowledge?

Community Board Term Limits

This is a problem Block Party can help solve.

PART TWO

What is the Opportunity for Civic Technology?

Now transitioning into the civic tech part of our presentation, where we will share how we leveraged technology to help make this information more accessible.

Community Board Meetings can be inaccessible.

As Tal has eluded to, community board meetings can be inaccessible, whether it is attending a meeting or staying informed on local policy decisions. This was always the idea behind block party, when community board meetings became virtually accessible on YouTube during the Covid pandemic, I thought it would be cool to use technology to create a summary and full transcript from the meeting conversation. Block party has continued to evolve over the years and continues to serve the community because most folks don’t have the time to attend the many hours of meeting conversations or know what was discussed.

Community Board 3 meetings on average last 02:07:38

For community board 3 the typical meeting lasts about 2 hours and occur a few times per week. Across community boards in the block party meeting transcript archive,

The longest community board meeting in our archive lasted 07:22:17

The longest community board meeting from the on record was 7 hours, 22 minutes, and 17 seconds. It was from Manhattan CB2 February 11, 2025 - Outdoor Dining Working Group Meeting This is evidence that A LOT is discussed at these meetings, but unless you’re really plugged in - it’s hard to stay informed or engage. This is really the ethos behind Block party

Where over the past 6 years we have collected hundreds of meeting transcripts across districts representing each borough.

Block Party’s Archive has 11,986 Community Board Meeting Transcripts dating from 2015 to yesterday

Since the start of the pandemic CB meetings have been publishing their meetings to Youtube, digitizing the information for archive, and public access. And the volume of meetings published continues to grow.

The Information Problem

Now here is what we did for resolutions. The rest of this presentation will be about Block party’s newest feature where we developed a searchable archive for community board 3 resolutions. You would have had to click through 17 years of resolutions. Who is going to do that? This makes it searchable. information but would take forever to read 268 meeting PDfs you have to look through manually, within those.

Database Overview — What Does MCB3 Vote On?

6,511

Total resolutions

21,593

Paragraph clauses

26.9

Avg resolutions
per meeting

Keyword frequency across 6,511 resolution titles:

Deny

2,546 (39.1%)

Approve/Approval

1,526 (23.4%)

Recommend

1,336 (20.5%)

Support

718 (11.0%)

Request

471 (7.2%)

Oppose

42 (0.6%)

Typically they Deny!

(unless stipulations agreed to)

Above 6500 resolutions that each have their own context and action. Within those are nearly 2M words, which is about 3.3 War and Peace novels. There is so much text, but no way to search across resolutions. There is no way to Ctr-F to find all resolutions. So CB3 tends to approve the denial of resolutions accounting for 39% of all resolutions — which seem to stem from their liquor license docket. The board’s default posture is to deny or set conditions (“Deny Unless Stipulations Agreed To”) rather than give unconditional approval.

When Key Community Decisions Become More Accessible

Analytics Opportunity

Search thousands of resolutions by address, business name, or topic

Track a community board’s position on recurring issues over 20+ years

Compare contested vs. unanimous votes by topic area

Identify patterns on controversial issues

With NLP / Embeddings

Semantic search: ‘Find all resolutions about outdoor dining’

Cluster resolutions by topic or location

Detect shifts in sentiment and language over time

Compare positions across community boards

Civic
Accountability

Flag if city agencies ignore a resolution

Track liquor license denial → approval

Explore how community boards respond to the needs of their district

Knowledge base linking resolutions to the meeting discussion

Taking it Further with AI

· What a database unlocks: Longitudinal analysis: “how has MCB3’s posture on liquor licensing changed?” · Pattern detection: what gets denied vs. approved? · Semantic search by address, business, or policy topic Use case possibilities: Extract locations that are discussed to search by business name, address, agency, permit type

When Key Community Decisions Become More Accessible

Analytics Opportunity

Search thousands of resolutions by address, business name, or topic

Track a community board’s position on recurring issues over 20+ years

Compare contested vs. unanimous votes by topic area

Identify patterns on controversial issues

With NLP / Embeddings

Semantic search: ‘Find all resolutions about outdoor dining’

Cluster resolutions by topic or location

Detect shifts in sentiment and language over time

Compare positions across community boards

Civic
Accountability

Flag if city agencies ignore a resolution

Track liquor license denial → approval

Explore how community boards respond to the needs of their district

Knowledge base linking resolutions to the meeting discussion

Taking it Further with AI

Particularly with term limits, access to institutional knowledge is even more important!

Here is How We Built It

Create Vector Embedding

Generate Summary

First we

The Source Data — Community Board Website PDFs

MCB3 posts meeting minutes and vote records publicly — but in three different URL formats across eras.

2021 – present

manhattancb3/downloads/minutes/YYYY/minutesYYYY-MM.pdf

2004 – 2020

manhattancb3/downloads/minutes/minutesYYYY-MM.pdf

2002 – 2003

manhattancb3/cb3docs/reso-archive/MM-Name-YYYY-Resolutions.pdf

Challenge: each era has different PDF formatting, vote tally conventions, and resolution structure.

It’s exciting to see some community boards have adopted solutions like Airtable!

How the Extractor Works — Three-Step Pipeline

Fetch PDF

HTTP request to nyc.gov

Processed in memory—no files saved

→

Extract text

pdfplumber reads all pages

Concatenates raw text string

→

Parse & store

Regex splits text:

Find resolution chunks (VOTE:)

Split by markers TITLE:
WHEREAS: THEREFORE:

Create Vector Embedding

Pause to ask if folks are familiar with vector embeddings

Generate Summary

Group text chunks by each section of the resolution

Send to a prompt

Specify the output structure

Who wants to read this?

Community concerns

Reliable data points

Locations

Entities

Topics

Next steps

Resolutions as a Data Source

We created a summary from the full resolution text in order to make the information more accessible. Here is what the full resolution looked like

What if we could dive into the meeting discussion?

“Our main concern is that, all parking spaces on Canal Street from Broadway to East Elizabeth Street will be removed under the new DOT plan to widen the sidewalks. This will create major problems for truck delivery to local businesses and for seniors and patients with mobility impairments, who rely on ambulance or call service to reach the doctor's offices. Especially, since there are about 200 medical providers and two large radiology center on Canal Street.”

Link to Full Transcript

What if we could search across all 59 community boards?

Join the Party! There are More Questions to Explore

16 / 16

A Tool for Civic Inquiry

What happens next. Did the agency comply? Did the developer get approved?

Extend to all 59 Community Boards

How might we generalize the pipeline? Each board formats their minutes differently.

Connect to the Committee Layer

Real deliberation happens in committees — can we connect conversation context to resolutions?

More Accessible

How might we improve how the key information can be extracted, summarized, digested?

Read more @ NYCuriosity. Join @ Committee Meeting. Subscribe @ Block Party.

Please share your thoughts/feedback/ideas with us!

Please look through it and give us ideas, and Sign up for email - subscribe Read Tal’s substack! He writes about newsletters about Community Boards Go to a committee meeting!

Join the Party!

blockparty.studio

[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahjunesachs/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tal-roded/

We would love to connect - come join the party and sign-up to stay updated on conversations happening in your community board, or search through our archive mode for stories and insight.

Thank
you!

nycsodata26.sched.com #nycSOdata #opendataweek

Stay in touch
at beta.nyc/links

Curious about a particular topic? initiative? challenge?

Community Board Knowledge Base

Local Government Memory

You would have had to click through 17 years of resolutions. Who is going to do that? This makes it searchable.

Curious about a particular topic? initiative? challenge?

You would’ve needed to search across 17 years of resolution PDFs

Explore the history of an initiative

Knowledge base for community

Analyze trends

Community Board Knowledge Base

Local Government Memory

Unless you’ve been on the CB for 17 years, you wouldn’t know that the CB has been talking about the redesign for ages.

Curious about a particular topic? initiative? challenge?

You would’ve needed to search across 17 years of resolution PDFs

Explore the history of an initiative

Knowledge base for community

Analyze trends

Particularly with term limits, access to institutional knowledge is even more important!

Community Board Knowledge Base

Local Government Memory