We Built an AI-Powered NYC Community Board Knowledge Base
Announcing the launch of Block Party’s Resolutions Archive, now available for Manhattan Community Board 3; meeting transcripts for most other CBs
I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new civic engagement tool, the Block Party resolutions archive.
Try to figure out what your community board has said on a particular topic, or how they’ve talked to a City agency about some issue or location in your neighborhood, or even just track down a particular business’s liquor license application.
For Manhattan Community Board 3 (MCB3), like many other community boards around NYC, finding those answers will involve opening a PDF of each month’s meeting notes, one month at a time, and manually searching for the topic or keyword of interest. Even for the most technologically adept CBs, who have taken to using Airtable, you’ll likely still have to open dozens of files and lack a method for universal keyword search.
Across MCB3’s publicly available meeting notes, going back to January 2002, there are over 250 PDF documents containing thousands of resolutions. Within those 250+ meeting notes in MCB3’s history are nearly 2 million words, which comes out to about 3.3 War and Peace novels.
There previously existed no centralized database of resolutions, no search function across meeting notes, and therefore no ability to easily consult what the community board has previously said on a topic or issue.
For more info on what resolutions are and why they’re important, see my Demystifying NYC Community Boards Guide.
To make things even more dire, term limits are coming to community boards. Come early 2027, and any community board members who have been on their board consecutively since 2019 will be forced to step down for at least two years. While turnover in public office is healthy and necessary, it also comes at a cost. Newer members on community boards (CBs) across the city do not always know the full history of issues in their community nor the full context of discussions that often stretch across years, if not decades, of meetings.
With older and often highly knowledgeable CB members soon forced to step down, newer and soon-to-join members need a way to fill in the gaps of all that lost knowledge.
Announcing the Community Board Resolutions Knowledge Base
Together with Sarah Sachs and other members of Block Party, I have created a CB knowledge base that will allow anyone - community board members new and old, NYC residents, and any member of the public with questions about local governance in NYC - to search topics or keywords across the entire history of MCB3 resolutions.
In addition to being able to quickly pull up full resolution text, each individual resolution is also provided with two to three sentence summaries of the background context and the key takeaways.
Paired with the pre-existing work by Sarah and the team to transcribe recorded community board meetings uploaded to YouTube (which is available across most CBs and since 2020), a vast sum of CB knowledge and historical records is now publicly available and easily searchable.
We currently only have our resolutions knowledge base available for MCB3, but we are actively working on adding the other 58 community boards. Please subscribe to Block Party’s newsletter here (and my Substack!) for updates as we add additional CBs and new features to our website and search tool.
In addition to expanding the knowledge base to cover all NYC CBs, we plan to add additional features like highlights for City agencies and elected officials, prominent/trending topics in CB resolutions, and linkages to other public meetings and NYC open data. Stay tuned for plenty more to come!
We would also love to hear if you spot any errors, typos, missing data, or other such faults with the knowledge base. If you have suggestions for additional tools or expansions, we would love to hear that too. Please email us over at [email protected], DM me here on Substack, or email me at [email protected].
In the meantime, I will be dropping some posts exploring insights that can be gleaned using our new CB knowledge base. I will explore what sorts of topics are discussed most in CB resolutions, how those vary over time and by committees, which electeds and agencies are the target of most resolutions, and other such insights. Look out for many fun data exploration pieces to come!
For now, I will share a bit more on one case study that we mentioned in our School of Data presentation…
Case Study: NYC DOT’s Reimagining Canal Street Proposal
NYC DOT has for many years been running public meetings on a Canal Street Safety Improvement Plan, considering options for improving street safety following several major incidents over the past decade and further back. MCB3 resolutions regarding this proposal, also called Reimagining Canal Street, stretch back over at least 7 years, to 2019.
Tracking down all of these resolutions across the monthly meeting notes would require searching through dozens of PDFs. Or, if you were a newer MCB3 member, you may not be aware at all that there is a history of resolutions on this topic that you can draw on for context on new presentations from NYC DOT.
Enter Block Party’s resolution archive. Searching the keywords “Canal Street redesign” brings up several resolutions, which provide insight into how long this proposal has been in the works and what has previously been discussed and requested by MCB3. Using our tool, you can easily click through and explore each of these relevant resolutions.
The summarization features on Block Party can also save you from reading through paragraphs and paragraphs of somewhat jargon-filled text.
We created a summary from the full resolution text in order to make the information more accessible. Here is what the full resolution looked like - not many have the time or patience to read through all these texts.
Not only do you get the summarizations, but if you do want to read the full resolution text, that is provided in a toggle button on the page for the resolution. Further, if you want even more context on what occurred at the full board meeting, the relevant resolution was voted on, you can click the “View Meeting PDF” button below the resolution title.
With this tool, finding resolutions over years of meetings can be instantaneous. Quickly skimming resolution summaries can help you identify if results match what you’re looking for. Links to the full resolution text, meeting notes PDF, or even going over to the transcripts archive section of our website and finding the transcribed meeting recording containing that resolution, all provide additional information and context to the resolution itself.
This is spectacular, thank you!
This is great Tal!