Prototypes & tools
Working software from our hackathons and our own prototyping, filterable by where each tool came from.
Source
Problem area

State Capacity Hackathon: Public Engagement · Sept 2026
What every community board asked the City for
Budget Requests
Every community board's Capital and Expense Budget Requests since 2019 with the agency response to each, combined from NYC Open Data and the Register PDFs. Click a district on the map, compare its requests against its 311 complaints and draft the follow-up email to the agency.
Open the tool ↗

State Capacity Hackathon: Public Engagement · Sept 2026
Where Medicaid hurts, in New Yorkers' own words
Hearts & Minds
A radar for the NYS Office of Customer Experience. The biggest problems people hit with Medicaid are laid out in the order they move through the program, sized by people affected and shaded by online mentions, with public YouTube stories for each. Sample data for the demo.
By Douglas Dahl & Sherry Liu
Open the tool →

SCE team
Where to put a city grocery store
Grocery Store Siting Tool
Identifies disadvantaged census tracts with high food insecurity and strong transit connectivity, then scores vacant city-owned lots as candidate store sites. Adjust the scoring weights and the top sites re-rank live.
Open the tool →

SCE team
Answer a City summons
NYC Summons Navigator
A plain-language guide for business owners who received a City summons: pick the issuing agency, enter the dates on the ticket, and see your deadlines and all four response options explained.
Open the tool →

SCE team
Get affordable housing approved
NYC Affordable Housing Approvals Navigator
Pick one of three real Brooklyn affordable-housing projects, set the financing and site facts, and get a phased roadmap of every approval between you and lease-up, including the ones the subsidy itself triggers.
Open the tool →
State Capacity Hackathon: A Civic Tech Build Night · June 2026
Flood risk against flood spending
TIDELINE: Flood-Resilience Capital Tracker
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
Open the tool →

State Capacity Hackathon: A Civic Tech Build Night · June 2026
A game that teaches 311
311 Learning Game
A video game that teaches New Yorkers how to use 311, turning the city's main service request line into something residents can actually navigate.
Open the tool ↗

State Capacity Hackathon: A Civic Tech Build Night · June 2026
Procurement record search
Procurement Record Search
A tool for searching and reviewing city procurement records, making contracting data legible to anyone who needs to follow where public money goes.
Open the tool ↗

State Capacity Hackathon: A Civic Tech Build Night · June 2026
Live transit data for AI tools
Transit Reliability MCP · npm
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server enabling live investigation of transit reliability. Already past 1,000 downloads since the event.
Open the tool ↗

State Capacity Hackathon: A Civic Tech Build Night · June 2026
Index of NYC's public datasets
Civic Data Index
A website that indexes NYC's civic data, giving residents and builders one place to find the datasets the city publishes.
Open the tool ↗