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 an open platform for closing that gap. Developers, students, and nonprofits build free tools on top of public data. We review each one against the four standards above. If it clears, we list it in the directory and help the communities who need it find it.
We're independent, unfunded, and small on purpose. 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.
Editorial board · NYC, 2026