Governments collect enormous amounts of data about schools, housing, public services, and the infrastructure of daily life — and most of it sits in formats the public can't actually read.
The data exists. The portals are live. The schemas are documented. What's missing is the unglamorous middle mile: turning a thirty-million-row CSV into something a tenant, a parent, or a grandmother can actually use.
CivicByte is my attempt at closing that gap. I build the tools, one at a time, and hold each one to the four standards above before it goes in the directory. The submission form is open to anyone else building on public data — I read every submission myself and apply the same four standards.
It is independent, unfunded, and small on purpose. Everything runs as static pages against the city's own public APIs, so there is no server in the middle, nothing to log, and nothing to sell. The work belongs to the people whose lives the data describes — not to a vendor, not to a platform, not to whoever bought the domain last.
Harry Honig · NYC, 2025