API Evangelist · New York City

NYC — Digital Modernization

The work

Domains assessed

Each domain taken through the full method and turned into explorable artifacts — a fruit index, an Open Data crosswalk, tech & API inventories, JSON Schemas, an OpenAPI contract, and an MCP server definition.

The pattern

~40 verbs, five families, one flat truth

Assessed the same way, 70 domains produced ~40 modernization verbs that collapse into five plays — Digitize · Expose · Unify/Federate · Transact · Standardize. Across all of them, two capabilities score zero citywide: transactional APIs and agent-readiness.

See the synthesis & aggregate scorecard →
Cross-domain synthesis

Seventy domains aren't 70 projects — they're instances of one playbook

Assessed the same way, 70 domains reveal one meta-pattern: the reporting data is broadly open, but the service layer — the thing a resident needs to do — is missing, hidden, or vendor-locked. 68 of 70 have no transactional API; agent-readiness is zero across all 70.

See the synthesis & maturity scorecard →
How

The method — seven steps per domain

The map

NYC government domains inventory

—distinct domains & subdomains catalogued

Browse the inventory →

Design-first, three contracts

One object model drives every domain: individual JSON Schema per object → an OpenAPI that $refs them → an MCP server that maps to the same operations. The APIs and MCP servers are design artifacts, not running services.