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Methodology & Coverage

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data.nycuriosity.com › cb-tools › Member Tracker › Methodology

No one publishes this data in one place, so coverage varies and this page says exactly how

New York has no citywide roster of community board members. This tracker assembles one from three source types with very different reliability, and labels every board with what its sources actually support.

The three source layers

1. The CAU dataset (all 59 boards). The Mayor's Community Affairs Unit publishes the NYC Community Boards dataset with each board's chair, district manager, office contacts, and meeting schedule. It is the only citywide, machine-readable source and supplies the leadership baseline for every board.

2. Borough president rosters (Bronx only, today). The Bronx BP publishes a full member roster with per-member term-expiration dates and recommending officials, the only machine-readable term data in the city. Queens and Manhattan have dormant Open Data rosters last updated in 2018-2019; if those offices resume publishing, the tracker will pick them up.

3. Each board's own website (rosters, officers, committees). A monthly crawl reads every board's site, 55 on the shared nyc.gov platform, the rest on a city WordPress install or independent domains, and extracts whatever the board publishes: full rosters on the best sites, committee chairs on about half, nothing machine-readable on a few. Every extracted name must appear verbatim in the page text; the pipeline never fills gaps by inference. What is missing on a board's page below is missing at the source.

Chair links. LinkedIn profile and news links on chair cards come from public web searches, matched manually to the chair's board role, never scraped from LinkedIn. A link is only shown when the match is confident; absence means no confident public match, not that none exists.

Manhattan resolution archives. Board pages for the 11 Manhattan boards with published minutes include resolution counts and recent decisions from Block Party, which extracts every resolution from board minutes. Vote tallies there are board-level counts; no NYC community board publishes how individual members voted.

Term-limit modeling. The four-consecutive-term cap (Charter §2800, 2018 ballot Question 3) started with terms beginning April 1, 2019, so the first forced wave lands March 31, 2027 and the five-term April 2020 class follows in 2030. Boards outside the Bronx show this structural clock rather than per-member dates, and the pages label which one you are looking at.

Coverage, board by board

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Refresh cadence: the pipeline re-fetches the CAU and Bronx datasets and re-crawls all 59 board sites monthly, re-extracting only boards whose pages changed. Member alerts fire on the diffs.

Known limits: Manhattan CB 7's site is a JavaScript app the crawler cannot read, so its roster is not covered. The Bronx roster reflects its latest published year and seats past their printed expiration may have been reappointed since. CAU chair names lag board elections by up to a few months.

Pipeline code: open source in the site repository under cb-tools/member-tracker/pipeline/.

Created by Tal Roded · NYCuriosity.