Block Party

We make local policy information accessible and byte-sized, with a weekly email of your community board’s most recent meeting highlights and transcript data.

Active

Since 2020

New York City

Block Party is a public archive of community board meetings that can be used to explore what is discussed throughout New York City at a local level. The project began in 2020 as civic engagement became virtually accessible and meetings were published on YouTube. As the project evolves, our structured dataset of more than 1,500 meeting transcripts, dating from 2015 to last week, can be used to analyze across the city what's being talked about, and where, and when. We use the closed-captioning text from community board meeting recordings on YouTube to automatically generate and share a full transcript, highlights, and topics directly from the meeting conversation. If you're interested, here is a quick explainer. We are looking to connect with Data Enthusiasts, Policymakers, Researchers, and the Civic-Tech community. If you would like to brainstorm how this tool can be further used, for civic engagement, local democracy, and community building, please reach out!