Council member demo scripts

Run-it-live demo scripts for showing BetaNYC’s grounded AI + NYC/NYS open data MCPs to a specific NYC Council member (or their staff). Each file is pre-filled for one district so it can be read straight off the page in a meeting.

Same idea as the ../community-boards/ demos, framed for a Council audience: their district’s 311, their own legislation, their discretionary funding, and oversight of the agencies they question at hearings.

These are the district-specific companions to the general prompt catalog in ../user-journeys.md.

Available demos

Demoing to a newly seated member? district-04.md is the worked example. The standard Act 2 (“what have you introduced?”) returns nothing for a member in their first year, and the script turns that into the strongest moment in the meeting rather than routing around it. Their first discretionary budget is the fiscal year after they took office.

Add rows as district demos are drafted.

Naming convention

Council districts are the stable unit (members change; districts don’t), so name by district as the primary key:

• district-01.md, district-33.md, district-51.md — zero-padded to two digits so they sort 01…51.

Optional thematic demos (a committee or role rather than one district) use a theme- prefix:

• theme-finance-committee.md, theme-land-use.md

How to add a district (customization checklist)

1. Copy TEMPLATE.md to district-[NN].md.
2. Fill the placeholders: [NN] district number, [MEMBER NAME], [NEIGHBORHOODS], and the overlapping community district(s).
3. Tailor Act 3 (their legislation + funding) — this is the act a Council audience cares about most. Pull the member’s actual recent bills and their discretionary awards so the demo is about them, not a generic district. Query Schedule C by sponsoring member surname, not by district number — there is no district filter, and asking by district silently returns citywide awards. See the parameter table in the template’s presenter-notes section.
4. Dry-run every prompt against the live MCPs and fill in the “Presenter notes (verified YYYY-MM-DD)” section with what actually happened, including the figures you plan to say out loud and how you got each one. This is not optional polish — several of these tools fail silently, returning real-looking data for the wrong question.
5. Add a row to the “Available demos” table above.

Keep the four-act arc. Only the district and member specifics change.

Decks (optional)

A district-[NN]-deck.html is the script in a presentation medium, for meetings where reading off a Markdown file is the wrong register. It is a companion to the script, never a replacement — the script stays the source of truth for figures and provenance.

Structure: every act is a side-by-side. Left panel is a real web search for the same question, right panel is the connector. This is what answers “how is this better than a search engine” without asserting it. Rules for the left panel:

• Run the searches and reproduce them verbatim. Never invent or paraphrase a result. The whole act collapses if one line is made up and someone checks.
• Flag the wrong-target results — a different person with the same surname, another member’s page, an unrelated institution. Those are the strongest single items in the deck and they occur naturally in almost every query.
• Don’t claim the search lied. It usually hasn’t. It returns portals instead of answers, secondary sources instead of the law, or the right number from a source you can’t cite. Say that — it’s true and it survives someone checking.

• Date the search on the slide. Ranking drifts; re-run before the meeting.

• Self-contained. One file, no build step, no network requests, no external fonts. It has to work on a council office’s wifi, or without it.
• Presenter notes are in the deck. Press N. Every trap from the script’s presenter-notes section rides along on the relevant slide, so you can run the meeting without a second screen or a printout.
• Keys: ←/→ move · N notes · R replay an animation · F full screen.
• Label every figure with the date it was verified, on the slide, not just in the notes. A deck outlives the session that built it, and a number with no date on it will get read aloud a month later.
• Animations are CSS. Don’t embed recorded GIFs of terminal sessions — they go stale silently against a corpus that moves, and they can’t be replayed on demand.

See also

• ../community-boards/ — the parallel demos tuned for community boards.
• ../user-journeys.md — the full, audience-neutral prompt catalog.