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NYC Councilmatic is a tool for understanding and tracking what’s happening in New York City Council.
This site connects NYC residents to local city council offices, for greater online public dialogue about issues in their communities.
Councilmatic helps you:
NYC Councilmatic is free, non-profit, and non-partisan and the easiest way to access official New York City Council information.
New York City Council is the lawmaking body of New York City.
The Council is made up of 51 council seats, with each representative typically serving a four year term.
The Council is an equal partner with the Mayor in governing New York City. Its responsibilities include:
Below are the primary types of city council activity.
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Introductions are the most interesting type of legislation because they are proposals for new laws. Once an introduction is passed, it becomes a Local Law - see all Local Laws for 2015.
Most of the Council's legislative action happens in committees. Each committee meets in public hearings 2-3 times per month where proposed legislation is debated. Members of other government branches, as well as the public, are able to attend and comment at these hearings.
Meetings of the entire Council, referred to as Stated Meetings, occur twice a month at City Hall.
This website is open source and on GitHub - meaning that anyone can re-use or adapt the code.
The data from this website comes from New York City Council's Legislative Research Center, a system built by Granicus using their Legistar Legislative Management Suite.
This data is then collected daily using the Open Civic Data standard and platform. Open Civic Data standardizes information about people, organizations, events and bills at any level of government and was built in collaboration with The Sunlight Foundation, Google, Granicus and Open North.
NYC Councilmatic is brought to you by the Participatory Politics Foundation, a NYC-based 501(c)3 non-profit organisation with a mission to increase civic engagement. David Moore is the program manager, based out of the Civic Hall community space.
The site was built by DataMade, a civic technology company. They build open source technology using open data to empower journalists, researchers, governments and advocacy organizations.
Funding for this project was provied by The Rita Allen Foundation, which is actively interested in promoting civic literacy and engagement, investing in young leaders in the sciences and social innovation, and building stronger communities.
Have a question about information you were seeking to find, or explanations of how NYC Council works? Send us an email info@councilmatic.org.
You can also follow us Twitter and Facebook.
Developer people: if you notice a bug, file an issue on our issue tracker!
The Participatory Politics Foundation and DataMade are committeed to spreading the Councilmatic platform to every city so everyone can stay informed on the actions of their local city council.
If you're interested in bringing Councilmatic to your city, sent us an email at info@councilmatic.org!
Councilmatic was originally created by Mjumbe Poe for Philidelphia, during his time as a 2011 Code For America Fellow. It was the first fully-developed open data site for municipal legislation in the United States.