NYC Community Board’s have mountains of documents related to land use in their districts. Only a small fraction of these have been scanned and put online as pdfs, but they are not fully searchable. We want to change to make this data readily available to the public.

I recently sat down with a group of passionate planners, hackers, and citizens at the APA Intelligent Cities Unconference morning session to discuss “Online Public Participation.” We all agreed that meaningful citizen input is often hindered by citizens not having all the facts or not being able to examine the data.
But this is a difficult challenge, as planners generally have insufficient resources to help citizens understand the issues, especially online.

Everyone has concerns and ideas about their communities. Where does one go to be heard? A first stop is the staff of your Community Board, who often can either point you to existing resources, or take your issue to the Board for discussion. But what if you want to do more than just register a suggestion or complaint?