Forging Links Between Public Scholarship, Civic Tech, and Open Data: A Showcase of CUNY Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) Projects
New York City Open Data Week – March 24, 2026
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Speakers: Ian G. Williams - Doctoral Student, PhD Program in Social Welfare, CUNY Graduate Center; Ezra Undag - Board Member, Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board; Seon Britton - Doctoral Candidate, PhD Program in Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
Moderator: Ian G. Williams - Doctoral Student, PhD Program in Social Welfare, CUNY Graduate Center
Introduction to the Public Scholarship Practice Space and CUNY Initiatives
Ian G. Williams opened the session by introducing himself as a doctoral student in social welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center whose work bridges digital humanities, sociology, and public scholarship. He explained that the session would showcase projects connected to the CUNY Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) and related initiatives such as Social Practice CUNY.
Williams described the CUNY Graduate Center as the “crown jewel” of the CUNY system and emphasized the institution’s commitment to the principle that knowledge is a public good. He explained that the Public Scholarship Practice Space emerged from the Center for the Humanities and supports projects that create accessible, publicly engaged scholarship oriented toward social justice and community collaboration.
He also introduced Social Practice CUNY as an interdisciplinary platform linking studio art, environmental justice, critical urbanism, and community collaboration across CUNY campuses.
Williams framed the session around a central provocation: public scholarship and open data emerged around similar historical moments and share overlapping values, but are often discussed separately. He argued that both fields involve producing publicly accessible knowledge rooted in communities, participatory methods, and social change efforts.
Ian G. Williams – Open Data, Civic Tech, and Critical Data Literacies
Williams began his presentation by recounting how his own engagement with open data started while taking courses in interactive data visualization and the history and philosophy of statistics. Working with census data led him to attend NYC School of Data in 2023, where he became interested in the intersection between civic tech, public scholarship, and digital humanities.
He explained that his experiences participating in Open Data Week and Discover Open Data workshops led him to broader questions about:
How people learn to interpret data
Who participates in open data communities
Which publics and counter-publics emerge around data
Whether open data fulfills its democratizing promises
Williams repeatedly returned to the unresolved question: “Is open data as democratizing as it promises?”
He discussed how civic tech communities historically emerged from:
Hacker spaces
Activist networks
Crowdsourcing projects
Web scraping communities
Open archives
Social movements
He argued that much public scholarship and activist data work exists outside official government portals but still overlaps substantially with open data practices.
Williams highlighted the Civic Tech Field Guide, created by Matt Stempeck, as an important global catalog of civic technology projects. This led him to ask broader questions about the effectiveness and visibility of civic tech tools:
“If a civic tech tool is released and nobody uses it, does it have any impact?”
He reflected on the assumptions embedded within civic tech and public-interest-tech communities, including optimism around digital literacy, hackathons, and participatory innovation. He noted that many of these ideas emerged during a more hopeful era of Web 2.0 thinking in the early 2010s.
Williams described attending the global TICTeC (Impacts of Civic Technology Conference) conference in Mechelen, Belgium, where practitioners, journalists, researchers, and human rights activists discussed the changing relationship between technology and democracy. He explained that civic tech organizations are increasingly rethinking earlier assumptions that technology naturally produces democratic outcomes.
He also discussed his own experiments teaching social work students to engage critically with 311 and open datasets through questions of:
Data justice
Critical data literacy
Social policy
Human-centered interpretations of statistics
More recently, Williams became involved with the CUNY AI Lab, where he explored experimental AI-assisted educational tools and reflected on how conversations around AI literacy have rapidly evolved since the public release of ChatGPT. He highlighted emerging work around:
Civic AI tools
Community-led AI audits
AI literacy in labor markets
Critical perspectives on AI governance
Ezra Undag – UKAI Initiative and Transnational Clothing Pathways
Ezra Undag presented the UKAI Initiative, a project exploring global secondhand clothing systems and “waste colonialism” through participatory research, public art, and open data methods.
He explained that the project began three years earlier through collaborations between Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts, the Surdna Foundation, Hester Street, and the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley.
Undag defined “waste colonialism” as the process through which wealthier countries export waste to poorer countries, shifting environmental burdens onto less powerful nations.
The acronym UKAI stands for “Unearthing Knowledge, Arts, and Interdependence,” while also referencing the Filipino term “ukay,” meaning secondhand market. He described how imported secondhand clothing markets are deeply embedded in everyday life across the Philippines, particularly among lower-income communities.
Undag outlined the project’s activities, including:
Public activations in New York and Manila
Field research in the Philippines
Embroidery and repair workshops
Film commissions
Climate comedy events
Fashion shoots featuring traditional embroidery
However, his presentation focused primarily on two initiatives:
Fabric banner mapping / transnational clothing pathways
Secondhand clothing characterization
The clothing characterization project was designed partly to support conversations around Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), a policy framework that would make producers financially and operationally responsible for managing waste generated by their products.
The team analyzed clothing collected at community clothing swaps in Little Manila Queens. They documented:
Brand names
Fiber compositions
Manufacturing origins
Volunteers photographed garment tags using digital cameras, and the project then used:
Microsoft Azure cloud services
OCR/computer vision tools
AI search
GPT-4 models
to extract and structure the data.
Undag explained that the resulting participatory dataset was visualized publicly through Tableau Public dashboards. Their findings showed that brands such as Uniqlo, Gap, Old Navy, and H&M dominated the sample, while manufacturing locations clustered heavily in countries including:
China
Bangladesh
Vietnam
Cambodia
Indonesia
He noted that many of these countries share histories of weaker labor and environmental protections exploited by multinational corporations.
Undag also demonstrated “transnational clothing pathways,” visual mappings showing how secondhand garments move from consumers in developed countries through sorting facilities, shipping networks, traders, and importers before arriving in secondhand markets in countries such as the Philippines.
The project used 360-degree video footage to document massive secondhand clothing sites in the Philippines. Undag described these spaces as overwhelming accumulations of discarded clothing exported from wealthier countries.
He concluded by discussing the project’s public art exhibition, “Worn Worlds: Acts of Repair and Threads of Peace in the Wake of Discard,” which aimed to translate research, lived experience, and theory into emotionally engaging public forms.
Seon Britton – NYC Mesh and Community-Owned Internet Infrastructure
Seon Britton presented research from his sociology dissertation examining NYC Mesh as a model for public infrastructure and digital equity.
Britton described his broader scholarly interest in organizations and grassroots community responses to technological systems. He framed NYC Mesh as an example of how local communities exercise agency within broader technological and economic structures dominated by large corporations such as Google and Amazon.
Drawing on organizational theory and “strategic action fields,” Britton argued that NYC Mesh operates simultaneously within:
The technology sector
Community organizing and civil society
He explored how organizations working on digital equity navigate these overlapping fields.
Britton emphasized that despite assumptions that Internet access is now universal, major digital divides remain. He cited a recent 2025 report showing that 22% of Bronx residents still lack home broadband access.
He argued that broadband access has become increasingly essential for:
Education
Employment
Participation in AI-driven economies
Everyday civic life
NYC Mesh, founded in 2012, attempts to address these inequities through a community-owned, donation-based Internet system built on rooftop antennas and volunteer labor.
Britton explained that NYC Mesh:
Uses rooftop satellite nodes to relay signals
Operates largely through volunteers
Encourages community ownership of infrastructure
Provides Internet access on a sliding-scale donation basis
He noted that wealthier users often subsidize lower-income participants, creating a broader ecosystem of mutual support.
The organization also emphasizes technical education. NYC Mesh maintains an open wiki that teaches users how Internet infrastructure works and how to troubleshoot their own systems. Britton argued that demystifying Internet infrastructure is central to the project’s ethos.
He demonstrated NYC Mesh’s publicly accessible infrastructure dashboards, which allow users to:
Explore node locations
View network traffic statistics
Monitor node performance
Understand network growth patterns
Britton emphasized that open data and public infrastructure should be inseparable: publicly owned infrastructure should generate publicly accessible data rather than privatized systems.
He concluded by stressing that digital equity also requires attention to:
Race and class inequalities
Governance structures
Community participation
Infrastructure maintenance
Discussion on Volunteerism, Open Data, and Public Engagement
Following the presentations, Ian Williams observed that all three projects relied heavily on volunteer action and community participation. He argued that open data ecosystems often depend upon unpaid labor, civic engagement, and grassroots care for public infrastructures.
Aleksandr Finkel from NYC OTI asked whether the presenters found the NYC Open Data portal easy to use. Williams responded that the portal can be overwhelming because machine-readable data is not naturally organized for human interpretation.
Williams expressed skepticism toward simplistic “data-driven” narratives that remove human expertise and context. He criticized highly automated policymaking approaches, referencing broader debates around DOGE and the removal of human-centered decision making from social programs.
Discussion on the Mamdani Administration and Digital Equity
Katie asked in the chat about hopes for the incoming Mamdani administration. Seon Britton responded that he hoped the administration would revitalize conversations around the NYC Internet Master Plan and digital equity initiatives.
However, Britton emphasized that progress would depend not only on mayoral leadership but also on broader coalitions involving:
Community organizations
Policy advocates
Civil society actors
Public-interest-technology groups
Williams added that affordability-focused policies could create opportunities for improving digital access and social equity more broadly.
Human-Centered Perspectives on Data and Technology
Gina Rae Foster reflected on how all three projects repositioned the human element within discussions about data and technology. She argued that the projects highlighted how communities actively shape and reinterpret data systems rather than simply consuming technological outputs.
Ezra Undag responded by emphasizing the participatory-action-research methods used in the UKAI Initiative. He explained that volunteers were not simply data collectors but collaborators who analyzed and reflected on the human implications of secondhand clothing systems and waste flows.
Seon Britton highlighted the idea of “subversion” within civic technology — communities using technologies for purposes different from those originally envisioned. He argued that smaller grassroots organizations often generate forms of innovation overlooked by dominant narratives focused on large technology companies.
Williams expanded the discussion by critiquing narratives that separate “digital” systems from everyday human life. He argued that data systems and digital infrastructures are now deeply embedded in how societies understand reality, make policy decisions, and organize social life.
He also stressed the importance of contextualizing datasets about social issues such as homelessness. Simply mapping complaints or statistical concentrations can strip individuals of dignity and humanity if broader social conditions are ignored. He connected this critique to organizations like Picture the Homeless, whose advocacy influenced policies around public bathrooms and homelessness in New York City.
Discussion on Technology Employment and AI Anxiety
The discussion later shifted toward concerns about technology labor markets, AI automation, and workforce development. Seon Britton cautioned against overly simplistic “learn to code” narratives that promise technology skills alone can guarantee economic mobility.
Williams connected these anxieties to longer historical processes involving:
Telecommunications deregulation
Social program retrenchment
Labor market instability
Economic crises
He referenced scholarship on the digital divide and technological unemployment, arguing that many current fears about AI and labor reflect broader structural inequalities rather than purely technological change.
Williams also discussed his own experiences graduating during the 2008 financial crisis and struggling through precarious labor markets before eventually entering social work and academia. He argued that hyper-individualized narratives about technology skills often obscure broader issues of wealth distribution, labor policy, and public investment.
Closing Remarks and Future Work
Seon Britton explained that his dissertation research on NYC Mesh would continue through ethnographic interviews and participant observation through 2027, with the goal of developing broader frameworks for understanding community-driven digital equity work.
Ezra Undag promoted an upcoming collaborative mask-making workshop using recyclable materials, organized in partnership with the CUNY Climate Justice Hub.
Williams concluded by reflecting on the many publicly engaged initiatives emerging from CUNY and emphasized the importance of experimentation, creativity, and public service in technology-related scholarship and community work.
RESOURCES
Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) — CUNY Graduate Center program at the Center for the Humanities that funded the projects showcased in this panel
Social Practice CUNY — pedagogical platform linking studio art, community collaboration, and environmental justice across CUNY campuses
Ian G. Williams — CUNY Graduate Center doctoral researcher whose work examines critical data literacies and “tech for good”
UKAI Initiative — transnational arts project on secondhand clothing and waste colonialism, presented by Ezra Undag
Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts — Woodside-based Filipino arts collective that incubated the UKAI Initiative
NYC Mesh — volunteer-run community broadband network and the case study in Seon Britton’s dissertation
Civic Tech Field Guide — crowdsourced global directory of democracy-tech projects curated by Matt Stempeck
Data & Society Research Institute — research institute behind the study on AI literacy and the Atlanta job market
The Promise of Access — Daniel Greene’s book on the digital divide and the “access doctrine,” cited by Ian Williams
NYC Open Data — the city open data portal and Discover Open Data workshops discussed throughout the panel