Get email alerts for NYC Council

Now, you can subscribe to free email updates about everything in the NYC Council. It’s easy to stay informed about local issues and share timely info.

Get daily email updates about every council member, legislative item, committee hearings, public meeting schedules — even custom search terms.

To start tracking, head to NYC Councilmatic. Visit any page — e.g., your Council member — and see the two new options: “Subscribe” and “Embed”.

Clicking on subscribe, you’ll be walked-through a quick signup process to create a free account with an email address. After you’ve registered, clicking “subscribe” on any NYC Councilmatic page adds that person or bill to your page of tracked items, as below:

Every morning, you’ll receive an email notification with automatic links to official NYC Council actions — stay informed with a daily push, instead of needing to visit the website and actively search. See example email:

Individuals and organizations can now assemble their own pages of tracked items, then share information with their communities. For example:

Get notifications for ANY Committee’s hearing schedule, as well as for ALL public meetings — what bills are on the agenda, who’s the chairperson:

I’m most excited about powerful email updates for search terms. Create alerts on the Legislation page for any simple search term, or even advanced search queries, with filters active (at left in below). For example, search all bills that contain the word “Bushwick” (my North Brooklyn neighborhood):

New: sort search results by date, title, or relevance — user-focused search is key to find information of interest in the legislative haystack. Also on any page for a Council member or legislative item, click “Embed” to get easily pasteable HTML — a free widget for local groups & political blogs:

Get in touch with questions, feedback, or to let us know what you’re tracking in NYC Council — simply email: info at councilmatic.org.

NYC community organizations & neighborhood groups, help us spread the word about these new tools. Kristen Rouse of the NYC Veterans Alliance, whose bill is featured on our homepage, says

“This is a great feature for NYC Veterans Alliance members to be able to track legislation they care about, themselves, and to see what community members are saying about it. It’s important to have their voices heard and integrate easily with our members’ social media channels. It’s user-friendly and accessible, and a great innovation that brings our government to our inbox. Our staff and volunteers will use the email alerts to track our legislation and the Veterans Committee meeting schedules.”

NYC’s local non-profit news site Gotham Gazette will also use new tracking features & embeddable widget over the course of this election year, with more local media partners to be announced. Finally, stay up-to-date about bills on the agenda for committee hearings, and post your comments for council offices — creating a feedback loop of local civic engagement. These features have never before been available to the public in a free website, launching first in the incredible NYC.

Some background from Catherine Bracy at PdF conference in 2015 — now all these features exist for wider accessibility, info-sharing and online participation, in open-source code that’s free to the public and built as a non-profit public service.

NYC Councilmatic is a project of our 501(c)3 non-profit Participatory Politics Foundation, supported by a 2015–2016 charitable grant from the Rita Allen Foundation for greater public dialogue (Rita Allen also funded the development of these new email alert features). I’m based here in NYC, working out of Civic Hall, and am actively seeking funding support to maintain NYC Councilmatic during this 2017 city-wide election year — get in touch to chat more, email: info at councilmatic dot org.

Councilmatic’s tech leads are DataMade, the stellar civic technology company based in Chicago who maintain the Chicago version of Councilmatic. Get in touch to discuss options for bringing a version of Councilmatic to your city or wider area, email: info at councilmatic .org. Open-source (on GitHub), with unique open city government data.

Follow me here on Medium for more descriptions of how to leave public comments in Disqus forums on the bottom of any NYC Councilmatic legislation page. NYC Council offices and government staffers, happy to chat in more detail, get in touch by simply emailing me — we’re working to connect more constituents to your district offices for productive local engagement. Contact us anytime, and help us spread the word.