BetaNYC CityCamp’s Tech Mayor Session

Bottom Line Up Front: Saturday’s BetaNYC CityCamp unconference moved beyond the usual “government should innovate” rhetoric to tackle the hardest question facing progressive cities: How do you build infrastructure that can deliver benefits for all, transparent governance, and community empowerment while navigating a “Himalaya of tech debt” amid federal hostility? The response needs technology, which is too often an afterthought.

The answer from intense collaboration among dozens of technologists, policy advocates, and civic innovators: Start with the systems that directly impact people’s lives, then build the governance structures to sustain them.

The session was proposed by Art Chang and Aidan Feldman, two members of the Tech Mayor project, a team of experienced private sector, Federal, State and City technologists developing a technology blueprint for New York City’s next administration. See our blog post series here. Sign up for our newsletter.

The session opened with a stark reality check. New York City faces what participants called a “Himalaya of tech debt” — decades of accumulated technical systems that barely function, procurement processes that favor the status quo, and hiring practices that can’t attract and retain the talent needed for 21st-century governance. At this meeting of civic technologists, we were looking for specific ideas of where the next administration should focus.

The political timeline demands immediate results. With Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary as proof that bold progressive promises can win, the next mayor will need to deliver universal childcare, affordable housing, and climate resilience at unprecedented speed and scale — without a supportive White House.

This isn’t just a political, financial or technical problem. It’s a governance design challenge.

Rather than abstract discussions about “digital transformation,” participants broke into working groups that tackled specific infrastructure challenges. We gathered ideas from the participants, then grouped those into six themes. Participants then self-selected into discussion groups organized by theme:

The Problem: Many agencies still have opaque data and processes, preventing both inter-agency collaboration and public innovation. While open data has strengthened interagency collaboration, it has not gone far enough.

The Solution: Provide more open data, as well as documentation of how data flows between agencies. Build minimal viable products that demonstrate the value of collaboration, overcoming the dual barriers of inadequate tools and insufficient political will. Build solutions with open source code as reusable components so one agency’s innovation can be easily adopted by another.

Key Insight: Start with small demos that quickly and cheaply prove collaboration works, then scale the governance structures around successful pilots.

The Problem: Families navigate separate, incompatible systems for housing assistance, healthcare, food support, and childcare — often resubmitting the same information multiple times.

The Solution: Design workflows that allow families to apply for multiple benefits through a single process while preserving privacy. Include human interaction points to bridge technology gaps and language barriers. This is what Mayor Adams’s MyCity aimed to do — it needs to go much further.

Key Insight: Benefits for all require access for all — technology that excludes anyone defeats the purpose.

The Problem: Agencies rely heavily on external contractors because civil service hiring systems don’t reflect modern skills and how they’re learned in 2025.

The Solution: Distinguish between IT infrastructure (phones, printers, etc.) and digital services. Build internal capacity for the latter, finding more appropriate balance between staff and vendor expertise. Reform civil service titles to match current skill requirements, starting with simple fixes like automated notifications for exam schedules. Consider overhauling the entire qualification process to ensure people with the right skills get to the right roles.

Key Insight: You can’t outsource institutional knowledge — cities need internal teams who understand both technology and public service.

The Problem: Software purchases are hidden within subcontractor agreements, preventing transparency and creating vendor lock-in.

The Solution: Mandate disclosure of all software licenses, strengthen the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services with full agency authority, and adopt the Open Contracting Data Standard. Build standardized procurement processes and transparent vendor databases.

Key Insight: Procurement isn’t bureaucracy — it’s policy implementation. Reform it, and you reform how government actually works.

The Problem: Community engagement happens through one-off meetings rather than sustained participation in governance.

The Solution: Create community network platforms with dedicated engagement budgets. Partner with existing organizations rather than building parallel structures. Design accountability mechanisms that give communities real power over policy implementation.

Key Insight: Technology should amplify existing community power, not replace it with digital participation theater.

The Problem: Technology gets bolted onto policies after they’re designed, limiting what’s possible and creating implementation failures. Also, an antagonistic federal administration further limits the city’s capacity.

The Solution: Mayors should include technology during policy discussions, not just at implementation time. Given the growing assertion of State rights over Federal rules, consider soft secession scenarios where cities build independent capacity for essential services, including municipal broadband.

Key Insight: In an era of federal abandonment, cities need technological sovereignty, not just efficiency.

The most powerful theme across all working groups: this isn’t about making existing systems work better. It’s about building entirely new infrastructure that enables different kinds of governance.

Universal benefits require interoperable systems. Community accountability requires transparent data flows. Economic democracy requires procurement processes that favor cooperatives and community-controlled enterprises. Climate resilience requires real-time monitoring and response capabilities.

None of this happens through better apps or websites. It requires rebuilding the technological foundations of how cities actually function.

What emerged from Saturday’s session wasn’t a traditional policy agenda — it was an implementation roadmap for technological infrastructure that could support the kinds of promises progressive mayors are making.

The common thread: Start with clear political priorities, then get interdisciplinary, empowered teams to build the systems to deliver them. Don’t start with technology and hope it somehow serves justice.

This means:

Saturday confirmed what many suspected: New York’s tech community includes hundreds of professionals ready to build infrastructure for progressive governance rather than just critique what doesn’t work.

The challenge isn’t finding people willing to help — it’s creating governance structures sophisticated enough to channel that expertise into systematic change while ensuring community accountability every step of the way.

For those who missed Saturday’s session, the work continues. We’re not just building better government technology. We’re designing the technological foundations for cities that can deliver economic justice, climate resilience, and genuine democracy at the scale of 8.5 million people.

The choice remains clear: build systems that enable progressive governance to succeed, or watch those promises founder on infrastructure designed for a different era and different values.

Next steps: The blueprint exists. Now we build it.

BetaNYC’s CityCamp brought together 200+ civic innovators for collaborative problem-solving.