Wired Community Boards

"When I started this internship, I didn't know what a community board was. Every day I would walk by the building where they have the meetings, but I had no idea what went on inside. Now I'm part of it," - Tiffany Williams

There are 59 community boards in the City, each representing between 150,000 to 200,000 residents. They deal with all kinds of issues in their districts and advise on land-use planning and budgets. They also provide for the only official community participation in City government. To do their jobs, members need current information about their communities—such as available services, building and lot ownership, and zoning—at their fingertips.

The Municipal Art Society promotes citizen involvement in neighborhood planning, and established its Planning Center to help community boards. In 2003, the Center started the Community Information Technology Initiative (CITI), a computerized mapping system with links to on-line resources. At www.myciti.org, the organization integrates a host of publicly available information. Anyone can access the site and pull up information they need, from zoning to census figures to City services.

"Our goal is to have every community board using CITI, and toward that end, the City is helping us get community board locations wired," said Micaela Birmingham, director of the Planning Center. "We don't want this to be a special program we provide; we want this to be a regular part of City government."

In 2004, the Center began refining CITI with the help of five community boards that explained how they planned to use the system and what additional features they would like. Direct links were added so users could access health indicators, income and employment data, lot dimensions, schools, open spaces, and more. Since then, more than 20 community boards in all five boroughs have started using CITI.

That same year, the Center also began CITI Youth, a program that trains high school students in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods to use the technology to make detailed maps for community planning. Students can then apply for internships with their community board to serve as "map technicians" during meetings. They attend each meeting and use a computer and projection screen to display maps from the CITI Web site that contain information the board is discussing.

"When I started this internship, I didn't know what a community board was. Every day I would walk by the building where they have the meetings, but I had no idea what went on inside. Now I'm part of it," said 17-year-old Tiffany Williams from Brooklyn.

Fatima O'Connor, another CITI Youth participant, said, "Before I started this internship I didn't know what a community board was and neither did my parents. Now my parents come to the community board meetings with me."