Seize the Means of Community

An Open Letter to Tascha Van Auken and the Office of Mass Engagement

Dear Commissioner Van Auken,

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Executive Order No. 7, establishing the Office of Mass Engagement, names a real democratic failure in New York City. The order recognizes that New Yorkers exercise agency when they build community with their neighbors, communicate their concerns and solutions, and engage with local government. It also recognizes that existing civic structures often privilege those with the most time and resources: meetings are long, applications are confusing, feedback is fragmented, and participation often seems disconnected from visible outcomes. The result is frustration, disenchantment, and disengagement.

That diagnosis is important. But the success of the Office of Mass Engagement will depend on how deeply the city interprets the phrase mass engagement. If it means only more surveys, more testimony drives, more public meetings, better feedback portals, and more coordinated outreach, the city may improve the existing system without transforming it. Those things matter, but they are not enough. Mass engagement should not mean mass intake: a more efficient process for collecting public input and routing it through City Hall. It should mean helping New Yorkers build the durable civic capacity to notice problems, share knowledge, deliberate, coordinate help, preserve memory, and act together over time.

Mass engagement should be the opening condition for a living civic ecology. By civic ecology, I mean the web of spaces, organizations, relationships, habits, records, tools, and conflicts through which people become able to participate meaningfully in the life of the city. That ecology includes government, but cannot be owned by government. It includes digital tools, but cannot be reduced to a platform. It includes formal meetings, but cannot depend mainly on people having the time, confidence, and procedural fluency to attend them. The question for the Office of Mass Engagement is therefore not only how to help more New Yorkers reach City Hall. It is how to help New Yorkers reach one another.

The Missing Layer: Civic Commons

The city needs engagement campaigns, accessible feedback venues, outreach to historically excluded communities, and feedback loops between residents and policy. Executive Order No. 7 assigns these duties to the Office of Mass Engagement, along with responsibilities involving community boards, district service cabinets, district managers, agency coordination, and training or technical assistance. But there is a missing layer between isolated residents and city government: the neighborhood or district civic commons.

A civic commons would not be merely a website, a city portal, a social-media group, a newsletter, or a meeting. It would be a locally rooted, digitally supported, cooperatively governed space where residents and local institutions can become more visible to one another and more capable of acting together. Its everyday value would come from ordinary civic life: water main breaks, train shutdowns, spare moving boxes, elder check-ins, accompaniment to appointments, community gardens, block parties, filming notices, local sports, tenant meetings, community-board agendas, recurring service failures, and the many small problems that now remain scattered across group chats, flyers, agency websites, social media, local newsletters, and word of mouth.

These examples may sound mundane, but they are not secondary to democracy. They are the practical life out of which democratic politics grows. People do not become civic actors only by attending hearings or submitting comments. They become civic actors through repeated experiences of mutual recognition, shared trouble, practical help, disagreement, memory, repair, and coordination. A tenant comparing landlord behavior with neighbors is already in civic life. A parent trying to understand a school policy is already in civic life. Residents documenting recurring elevator outages, transit disruptions, sanitation failures, or agency delays are already producing public knowledge.

The problem is that these civic activities are usually fragmented and fragile. The city should not try to absorb them into one official system. But it can help make them more visible, durable, accessible, privacy-respecting, and capable of informing public decisions.

Enable, Do Not Own

A civic commons controlled by City Hall would not be a commons. It would be an engagement apparatus. The distinction matters.

The city can convene, support, translate, train, fund, connect, and listen. It can help residents understand how to interact with agencies. It can help community-board processes become more legible. It can support pilots, technical assistance, accessibility, and public standards. But it should not own the civic spaces through which New Yorkers deliberate, remember, coordinate, and hold power accountable.

A real civic commons must be able to support City Hall when City Hall is right, inform it when it is incomplete, pressure it when it is slow, and oppose it when necessary. That is not a defect. It is what makes such a commons democratic. If the Office of Mass Engagement becomes only a more effective way to gather input for the administration, it will fall short of its promise. If it helps New Yorkers build civic capacity that does not belong to the administration, it could become one of the more important democratic experiments in city government.

Infrastructure Should Match the Politics

The form of this work matters. A city trying to build democratic civic capacity should not rely uncritically on the proprietary, centralized, extractive platforms that have helped weaken democratic life. Civic infrastructure should be open where possible, privacy-respecting, accessible, multilingual, interoperable, and governable by the people and institutions that depend on it.

New York would not be starting from zero. The open-source civic-technology world has already developed tools that address parts of this problem: participatory budgeting, structured deliberation, collaborative decision-making, shared files, calendars, transparent records, project coordination, and community governance. Decidim, Loomio, CONSUL Democracy, Nextcloud, openDesk, and related projects are not by themselves a civic ecology. They do not solve trust, moderation, language access, disability access, unequal time, digital exclusion, institutional power, or the labor needed to maintain a commons. But they show that public engagement need not depend entirely on proprietary platforms, scattered surveys, social-media fragments, commercial cloud systems, or consultant-designed portals.

The deeper lesson is that civic participation requires infrastructure, governance, continuity, and ecology. A citywide engagement office should not ask only how to collect more feedback. It should ask how to help residents and local organizations sustain the civic ecologies in which meaningful participation becomes possible.

A Federated City Needs Federated Civic Life

New York is not one community. It is a city of neighborhoods, languages, histories, buildings, schools, tenant associations, libraries, public housing developments, faith communities, immigrant networks, parks, workplaces, and informal local worlds. A single centralized engagement platform cannot adequately represent that reality.

A better model would be federated. By federated, I do not mean fragmented. I mean that different neighborhood, issue-based, institutional, tenant, school, library, mutual-aid, and cultural spaces should be able to remain distinct while becoming more discoverable, mutually aware, and capable of coordination. The goal should not be one massive official forum. The goal should be a civic ecology in which many local commons can connect without being absorbed into a single hierarchy.

This approach would also strengthen existing civic institutions rather than bypassing them. Community boards, for example, are important, but their meetings can be hard to follow, hard to attend, procedurally narrow, and disconnected from the everyday ways people encounter public problems. Local civic commons could help residents understand agendas, prepare testimony, document follow-up, compare experiences, track recurring issues, and turn isolated complaints into visible public patterns. They would not replace community boards. They would give them a stronger civic substrate.

Maintenance Is Civic Work

A living civic ecology requires labor: documentation, translation, moderation, calendar maintenance, meeting summaries, accessibility work, onboarding, technical repair, conflict handling, and preservation of public memory. This should not be treated only as a procurement problem. It should also be treated as civic education and public work.

The administration could encourage interdisciplinary projects among CUNY campuses, community colleges, public high schools, libraries, community boards, and local organizations. Students and faculty in technology, public administration, urban studies, journalism, design, social work, translation, history, library science, accessibility, and related fields could help design, research, build, document, evaluate, and maintain neighborhood civic commons. They could map local resources, summarize community-board meetings, translate and simplify agency materials, maintain public calendars, document recurring service failures, conduct oral-history projects, and support open-source tools.

Done properly, this would not be free labor for City Hall. It would need stipends, course credit, supervision, community accountability, and real educational value. But it could become civic education through civic maintenance. Students would not merely study government. They would help maintain the civic conditions under which democratic government becomes more possible.

Libraries, Hosting, and Connectivity

Public libraries may be among the natural institutional homes for this work. They already provide access to knowledge, technology, local history, meeting space, digital literacy, public trust, and non-commercial information infrastructure. A citywide civic-commons strategy could build on that role by supporting orientations, digital-literacy help, local archives, public documentation, meeting space, and access for people who cannot or do not want to participate only from personal devices.

Over time, this points toward something larger: public-interest civic hosting. New York might eventually help provide privacy-respecting, open-source digital capacity that local groups could use for websites, calendars, shared files, collaborative documents, archives, meeting spaces, and public records. This should not mean one City Hall-owned platform for civic life. It should mean a supported ecology of locally governed, interoperable tools that gives residents and community groups an alternative to dependence on corporate platforms.

This question does not stop at software. Civic participation also depends on access, connectivity, resilience, and local control. New York already has community-led efforts, such as NYC Mesh, that treat connectivity itself as a commons. OME would not need to run such networks, but a city serious about mass engagement should understand that participation depends not only on invitations, forms, and meetings, but on the material conditions that let people communicate at all.

Trust Requires Design

A civic commons is not automatically benign. A space where neighbors ask why an elder has not been seen recently can become a space of care, but it can also become intrusive. A space where people document landlord abuse, immigration fears, policing, benefits problems, or health needs can become empowering, but it can also expose people to risk. Privacy, consent, moderation, and safety cannot be afterthoughts. A civic commons should not become a surveillance commons.

This is especially important for immigrants, tenants, workers, unhoused people, people with disabilities, people navigating public benefits, people with precarious legal status, and anyone vulnerable to retaliation. Trust will not come from branding. It will come from design, governance, practice, and accountability.

The same is true of accessibility and language justice. Reaching people who have not historically participated in government decision-making cannot mean only inviting more people into existing formats. It means changing the formats: plain-language summaries, multilingual materials, interpretation, accessible design, offline access points, asynchronous participation, disability access, and help for people who do not already know how city processes work. The goal should not be to make more people behave like professional meeting-goers. The goal should be to make civic life more available to ordinary people.

A Modest Proposal

The Office of Mass Engagement does not need to build a citywide civic commons from scratch. It should not try. A better first step would be to convene a public conversation about how New York might support a federated ecology of neighborhood civic commons.

That conversation should include civic institutions, local organizations, residents not already embedded in formal politics, public-interest technologists, privacy advocates, accessibility advocates, educators, librarians, community-board participants, youth organizations, and people already maintaining local networks of care and information. OME could then explore a small number of pilots, publish public-interest principles for civic digital infrastructure, support open-source experiments, fund maintenance and translation, create directories of existing civic resources, and help local commons connect to community-board and agency processes.

I have begun a small and preliminary experiment in this general direction at Inwood Nexus: https://inwoodnexus.nyc. It is not a finished model, and I am not suggesting that the city adopt it. I mention it only to make clear that this proposal is not merely abstract. I have been thinking practically about what a local, online-first civic commons might look like and how such efforts might begin.

The creation of the Office of Mass Engagement is an opening. It can become a better way for City Hall to hear from New Yorkers. That would be useful. But it can become something more important: a way to help New Yorkers build durable civic capacity with one another.

That is the deeper promise. Mass engagement should be the beginning of a civic ecology broad enough, practical enough, and democratic enough to make participation part of ordinary city life.

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