Welcome to NYC School of Data — a community conference that demystifies the policies and practices around open data, technology, and service design. This year’s conference concludes NYC’s Open Data Week & features 30+ sessions organized by NYC’s civic technology, data, and design community! Our conversations and workshops will feed your mind and inspire you to improve your neighborhood.
To attend, you need to purchase tickets. Venue is accessible and content is all ages friendly! If you have accessibility questions or needs, please email us at < schoolofdata@beta.nyc >.
If you can’t join us in person, tune into the main stage live stream < schoolofdata.nyc/live > provided by the Internet Society New York Chapter and sponsored by Reinvent Albany. Follow the conversation #nycsodata on Bluesky.
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Laws are meant to govern everyone, yet they often feel inaccessible to all but legal experts. As we move into an era where AI and automation shape how we interact with information, we have to ask: What does it mean to digitize the law? Who decides how legal texts are structured, processed, and interpreted by machines? And most importantly—how can we ensure that legal AI tools serve the public, not just Big Tech?
This talk will explore these questions through the lens of a project building a custom, domain-specific LLM trained on Titles 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, and 20 of the NYC Administrative Code. It will walk through the process of transforming administrative code into a machine-readable format, the challenges of working with legal language, and the value of building a custom LLM instead of relying on existing AI tools. Along the way, we’ll consider the bigger implications of legal AI—who gets to decide how we interpret laws for digital systems, how do those systems execute the laws, and what are the implications for equity and a future shaped by technology?
The session will include a live demo of the chatbot and see firsthand how it engages with NYC administrative code. We’ll close with key takeaways on the future of AI in legal accessibility and what it means to build tools that truly serve the public.
Jordan Shapiro, M.A., is a tech policy expert and data analyst focused on government digitalization. She has worked on tech policy initiatives in the U.S., U.K., and E.U. and serves as a SPRITE+ Expert Fellow and BetaNYC Associate Board member. A techno-optimist, she aims to help shape a world positively transformed by technology.
