An interactive dashboard connecting where New York floods to where the city spends its flood-resilience capital dollars, down to the community-district level, plus a time-animated playback of the May 20 flash flood across the subway and bus network.
By David A. Lee, Dean Berkowitz & Lyndsey Kaplan. Republished with permission.
One evening. 80+ people split into 20 teams and built 20 real tools in under two hours, working against specific government service-delivery problems.
The night was hands-on building from the start. Teams formed around problem statements from our expert judges, each drawn from a real government need, then turned them into working prototypes and demoed what they built.
What stood out was who was building. Technologists wrote code, but government practitioners flagged when a tool did not match real workflows, researchers identified key data sources and ran live evaluations, and advocates reviewed design and accessibility. As one practitioner put it: "AI meant for the first time we could weigh in on design and product decisions instead of bee-lining towards writing code."
Hosted with our partners Civic Roundtable and CUNY PIT Lab.
The goal
What we set out to do:
Show that AI is a tool for inclusive rapid prototyping. A roomful of people from different backgrounds, not only career engineers, can turn an idea into working software in a single evening.
Have teams build against real problem statements from our expert judges, each grounded in a concrete government need, so the night produced working prototypes rather than talk.
Tracks
Each track got a real problem statement sourced from a government practitioner before the event. Teams self-selected on arrival.
Mayoral priorities
Agents that support priority initiatives from the incoming administration, such as municipal grocery store siting and operations, permitting reform for affordable housing, and easing small services applications.
SNAP and benefits delivery
Agents for eligibility prescreening, application support, and caseworker assist on changing policy (e.g., HR1).
NY Open Data
Agents that make NYC's open data usable for residents: plain-language Q&A, public consultation summaries, and dataset-to-answer pipelines.
Open
Bring-your-own problem statement. Teams that arrived with a live government need from their own work could pitch and recruit collaborators on the night.
Expert judges
Dan Steinberg
Executive Director, NYS Office of Performance Management and Innovation (OPMI)
Dan has spent over a decade building data and performance infrastructure for government. He leads NYS OPMI, an office recently created by Governor Hochul to strengthen statewide performance management systems, and previously directed the NYC Mayor's Office of Operations, building real-time monitoring systems across city agencies.
Josh Seiden
Co-Founder, Civic Roundtable
Josh co-founded Civic Roundtable and has spent the past several years in the room where the actual work happens: onboarding agencies, running trainings, and making sure the technology lands. He brings a ground-level perspective on deploying technology in government settings.
Stephanie Yim
Design Operations Director, Public Policy Lab
Steph is an experienced multi-disciplinary designer and strategist working at the intersection of government and civic tech. She partners with agencies to improve public service delivery to at-risk communities and co-founded Good Call, NYC's arrest support hotline.
Benjamin Kallos
Attorney; former NYC Council Member and U.S. Digital Service member
Ben has spent his career using technology to make government more open, accountable, and easier to navigate. His experience spans city government, the White House, and legal practice supporting communities and small businesses.
Event archive
The original event page lives on Luma as a historical archive of the build night: agenda, signups, and logistics as they ran.