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Eight minutes. Seven slides. Slide 8 stays up for questions.
Session theme is the values imbued in AI systems. This talk's claim: the values are not in the model, they are in the design choices around it. Slide 3 is the conversation; slide 4 is the argument; slide 5 shows it running.
Some of the room holds "AI is bad" as a starting point. Do not argue with it. Slide 4 meets it head on.
N hides these notes. G is the grid. F is full screen. On slide 6, click a card to play its demo; click one, not seven.
Tools and a place to ask. The connectors in this talk come from here.
AI 101, AI Civics 201, School of Data, Open Data Week.
Workforce development: the people who will run this inside government.
Same three as yesterday's AICE kickoff. Thirty seconds. The rest of the talk lives in the first card, and the ask on slide 7 reaches back to the second.
The one-line descriptions under each heading are mine, not from the AICE deck; adjust the words to taste.
Digital sovereignty is the principle that a municipality controls the infrastructure its democracy runs on: its laws, its data, its records, its services.
In the 1840s New York decided water was public infrastructure and built the Croton Aqueduct, rather than renting access to it.
June 2026: we asked the Commission on Government Efficiency to write digital sovereignty into the city charter. It did not advance. That is the starting point.
The four digital freedoms. The People's Roadmap to a Digital New York City, 2013. BetaNYC has worked this ground since 2008.
This is the slide. Give it two minutes and make it a conversation, not a lecture. Say the headline, then stop.
A concrete NYC version if the room wants one: the Council's legislative record lives on Legistar, a vendor platform. The city's own Charter and Administrative Code are published through a vendor, American Legal Publishing. The records are public. The interface is rented. Every connector on slide 6 reads one of those rented interfaces and hands the public back a public one.
The COGE testimony was delivered by Jordan Shapiro on 2026-06-11. "It did not advance" is the honest status; do not soften it. The values in the AI tools are downstream of the values on this slide, which are from 2013 and older.
A question to put to the room: what in your city is public in principle and rented in practice?
"AI is bad" is a reasonable place to start. An ungrounded model asked a civic question gives a confident answer nobody can check, which is one more thing rented from a vendor. The tools we build are a small piece of the fourth kind of capacity, and they only count if they pass the test on the right.
This is the slide for the session theme. The room is asked to assess the values in AI systems. The right pane is ours, as five checkable choices. The left pane is what those choices are in service of.
Do not argue with "AI is bad." Concede it, then reframe: the question is not "is AI good," it is "who controls it and can you check it." That is a sovereignty question.
Three honest limits if asked: one record you already know, a browser tab wins; anything legally operative, go to the source document; a join that does not exist, no tool fixes a missing key.
Verified 2026-07-21 This establishes the dataset is not on the portal. It does not establish the report was never produced; it may have gone to the Council as a PDF. Different claims, different remedies.
A public that can check its own government against its own mandate is capacity. That is why this is the demo: a law in the Administrative Code, checked against what is actually published, by anyone, in twenty seconds. Reproducible against any reporting requirement.
Report a negative at exactly the width you tested. Say the correction out loud before anyone asks. Overstating once costs more than the finding was worth.
Press R to replay if the animation ran while you were still talking.
nyc-council-mcp
nyc-charter-laws-rules
nyc-checkbook-mcp
nyc-record-mcp
nyc-budget-mcp
nys-openlegislation-mcp
nyc-311-mcp
Socrata connector, by Nathan Storey
The front door, written for people. If it does not tell you what this is and who it is for, that is the repo's fault, not yours.
What you may do. CC BY-SA: use, change, share, credit us, keep it open. Connectors are MIT: fewer strings still.
Where you ask a question or say "this is wrong." No code needed. A free account and a sentence.
Your own copy, to change as you like. There is a copy-me template for your own district or town.
Click one card, not seven. Charter is the crowd-pleaser (the two beavers). Budget is the honest one (it shows our own funding). 311 states its own limit. Every drawer result was dry-run on the date in its badge; nothing is invented.
Then switch to a browser tab. Open github.com/BetaNYC/grounding-ai-with-ny-open-data. About 90 seconds, in this order: 1. Scroll the README; point at the audience table. 2. Click guides/ → council-members/ → TEMPLATE.md: "the copy-me file." 3. Click the Issues tab: "where you talk to us." 4. Hover Fork, do not complete it: "your copy." 5. Show the website version. 6. Come back here.
Say it out loud: "If you have ever felt like you were somewhere you were not supposed to be on GitHub, that is a design failure of GitHub, not a gap in you."
Twenty classes exist in draft, on four dimensions taught together: staying safe, play and experimentation, accountability, and regulation. The first three are drafted and uneven. The fourth barely exists. The ask is in two parts.
We have
Four AI Civics 201 classes: Staying safe, Digital hygiene, Spotting AI fakes, What AI costs.
We need
The dimensions we are missing. You will see them before we do.
We have
First questions, José & Justin (fact-check the beavers on the city seal), and seven connectors to play against.
We need
Exercises that are fun before they are useful.
We have
Following the money, Filing a FOIL request, and the verified / illustrative badge on every claim.
We need
Cases from outside New York, and a way to grade an answer.
We have
A charter ask that did not advance, and a lot of opinions.
We need
This is the gap. The class that teaches someone to read a rule, and to write one. It is where you are strongest and we are weakest.
This is the slide the organizer asked for. Do not rush it. Data & Society is already a content partner on AI 101; this is the ask to build the next one together, in the open.
The class names on the cards are real: AI Civics 201 is twenty classes, 00 through 19. The repo is private today; open-sourcing it by end of 2026 is the stated goal. Two-part ask, and say the order out loud: finalize the first three dimensions now; develop regulation with us later.
Tie regulation back to slide 3: the charter conversation is the regulation class, and we lost the first round. Ask the room who else is writing rules.
NYC Council & Legistar · Office of the Comptroller (Checkbook NYC) · The City Record · NYC Charter, Code and Rules via American Legal Publishing · NYC 311 · NYS Senate OpenLegislation · NYC Open Data and NY State Open Data, on Socrata.
Nathan Storey: the Socrata connector and civicaitools.org. Data & Society: content partner on AI 101. The NYC Council AICE Initiative.
Fiscally sponsored by the Fund for the City of New York. We have received funding and support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Blue Ridge Foundation, the New York City Council, Data & Society, Microsoft Civic, Mozilla, Socrata, Accela, Carto, NYC Media Lab, Datapolitan, Ontodia, and private donors.
The Council line you can check yourself, with the budget connector, in about fifteen seconds: $25,000, FY2026, Council Member Restler, District 33, Digital Inclusion and Literacy Initiative, via DYCD. Verified 2026-07-29
BetaNYC uses AI openly and with human accountability. This deck was assembled with AI assistance (Anthropic's Claude) under staff direction and review. The connectors were built the same way, then reviewed and tested by staff before release.
Every demo result carries the date it was dry-run against the live connector. Figures on live systems change; a number true on that date may not be true today.
Seven connectors: MIT. Guides, decks, and this talk: CC BY-SA 4.0, crediting "BetaNYC, a partner project of the Fund for the City of New York." Government records are public records of the City and State of New York.
Not presented. Leave it on screen for questions.
The funder list is the public one at beta.nyc/supporters, last updated 2024-10-21, and it is phrased "have received," so it is cumulative, not current-year. If a current foundation grant is missing from it, add the name here and fix the website.
The funding disclosure is the closing move if the room is still skeptical: a talk about values in AI systems that would not disclose its own funding or its own AI use has no standing.