Inspiration
Different New York City Community boards have their own websites, and the information surrounding their meeting can sometimes be difficult to navigate.
What it does
NycB provides a simplifies, interesting view of upcoming and past New York City community board meetings. Users can select the issues they care about, including Housing, Transportation, and Licensing, and NycB prioritizes relevant agenda items and decisions without hiding the rest of the meeting.
How we built it
We built it as a light web application using HTML, CSS, and little JavaScript. The frontend includes reusable meeting views, dynamic pagination, expandable agenda items, interest-based content prioritization, English/Spanish localization, and state-preserving interactions. Upcoming meeting actions can generate pre-filled email drafts and Google Calendar events directly from the information being viewed.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was deciding how much information to show without recreating the complexity we were trying to solve. Community Board meetings can cover several unrelated issues at once, so we needed a way to personalize the experience without filtering out information residents might still want to discover. We ultimately prioritized agenda items matching a user's interests while keeping the rest of the meeting accessible. We also had to think carefully about the difference between upcoming and past meetings. Upcoming information should help someone understand an issue and participate, while past information should explain what happened and what comes next. Designing those as two distinct experiences became an important part of the project. Finally, working within a hackathon timeline forced us to make deliberate decisions about scope. Rather than attempting to build every possible civic feature, we focused on creating a coherent experience that we could demonstrate from beginning to end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Users can move from discovering a meeting to understanding individual proposals, personalize what they see based on their interests, switch the entire experience between English and Spanish, prepare questions about upcoming issues, add meetings to their calendar, and return later to understand meeting outcomes.
What we learned
We learned a huge amount technically. Building NycB gave us hands-on experience with frontend development, JavaScript state management, responsive interfaces, Git/GitHub collaboration, localization, and designing interactions around real user flows rather than isolated features.
What's next for NycB (New York Community Boards)
The current version demonstrates NycB using sample meeting content. The next major step would be connecting the interface to real Community Board agendas, minutes, and other official meeting materials, then building a reliable pipeline for extracting and structuring that information. From there, we would like to expand beyond the current interest categories, support more Community Boards across New York City, improve multilingual access, and develop more robust ways for residents to follow issues over time.
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