March 5, 2026 to March 7, 2026

Urban Informatics for Safe, Just, and Thriving Communities Hackathon

PUBLIC INTEREST TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY NETWORK: TECH FOR CHANGE

We unleashed innovation for urban transformation! Read about the NYU 2026 PIT-UN Hackathon to build safe, just, and thriving communities.

Mission Statement

The 2026 NYU Public Interest Technology University Network Tech for Change Hackathon invites students and community members from across disciplines to participate in this 3-day event to build civic tech tools toward solving community needs, specifically around public safety, justice, and assets-based approaches to building community capacity in New York City and beyond. TFC Hackathons are civic-focused, community-driven, and deployed by students to address local injustices.

Our Winners

Overall Winner: CivilChat

Overall winners Nissim Ram and Jose Ignacio Rodriguez Jimenez built a chatbot to answer questions about the CCRB, a dataset of civilian complaints against police officers who may have abused their authority. Through exploring how to connect a natural language interface to a real dataset end-to-end, building a FastAPI backend that translates user questions into SQL queries, executing them against the data, and returning plain language summaries to the chat, they addressed the challenge of making dense public records feel intuitive. draws upon thousands of NYC Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) data entries over decades, using hashtag#RAG to create a chatbot user interface to query about alleged police misconduct, enabling lawyers, researchers, or potential victims to ask questions using natural language about individual officers, locations, and FADO types. This tool has tremendous implications for hashtag#LegalAI and we're excited to see it develop.

Their project exemplifies how public interest technology can make justice more accessible and transparent to the public.

Imagination Prize: The Changemakers

The "Toolkit for Change" application in partnership with the Center for Justice at Columbia University led by Jason Bostic, Carla Sanchez, Daniel Foulen, and Shasuna Lin featured an application built for youth. Using RAG to surface vetted information and generate actionable how-to guides for community members to create change and become organizers, the app develops a roadmap for change at your fingertips! This project truly reimagines community organizing and development, using tech tools to power action.

Impact Prize: Reset the Slate

Reset the Slate was developed in partnership with Tyler Richardett of Free Our Vote, powered in part by Bright Data, led by Ursula Kaczmarek, Haya Srour, and Arrio Hoffman. They developed a tool to enable Pennsylvanians with felony convictions to navigate eligibility, documentation, and petitioning to expunge their records in accordance with the Clean Slate Act. With over 45,000 Pennsylvanians newly eligible to restore their voting rights, this free and accessible application has immense potential to make a direct impact on political enfranchisement of system-impacted individuals.

Innovation Prize: Safe Step

SafeStep uses the credible messenger canvassing framework innovated by Crisis Management System organizations like Man Up! Inc. to disrupt violence and put the agency of public safety into the hands of community. Led by Aunray Stanford, Elijah Weston-Capulong, Nara Valera-Simeon, Cedric Lam, Abek Khokhar, Ross Amspoker, and Patrice Robinson, this app leverages the grounded knowledge of community violence intervention to innovate an application that allows users to walk safer through route prediction based on user-sourced information and live open data. It is technically cutting edge and market savvy.

IMPACT TRACKS

Serving as the Hackathon's guideposts for impact, our 3 Impact Tracks invite both innovation from participant generated projects and partner-sponsored project frameworks designed to ignite participant creativity.

SAFE

Participants choosing the Safety Impact Track will address the question: How can we redefine public safety? Leveraging data to explore and redefine what safety means, projects will be guided by the unique perspectives participants bring.

Participants choosing the Just Impact Track will address the question: How can we use data to advance justice? Whether examining injustice or identifying opportunities for equity, projects will innovate data tools for a just society.

Participants choosing the Thriving Impact Track will address the question: How can we use data to empower human flourishing? Through an assets-based perspective, projects in this track will creatively foster community growth and well-being.