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A Coworking Site For Civic Tech In New York City

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Amid a growing interest in civic tech--technology aimed at improving the civic life of communities and boosting overall engagement--a new coworking space in New York City recently opened for social enterprises and other folks. Called Civic Hall, its co-founders are Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, who also are co-founders of Personal Democracy Media, which, among other things, runs the Personal Democracy Forum, a conference about how technology is changing politics. "Technology has a huge potential to impact the civic arena," says Rasiej.

The goal: to turn the 18,500 square foot Civic Hall into a community center for people interested in making the world a better place through technology and social innovation. That includes everyone from entrepreneurs and academics to journalists and data scientists. In fact, according to Rasiej, diversity is essential to Civic Hall's purpose, because it provides what he hopes will be a place where cross-pollination among different people with different takes on civic tech can happen. "There is an intentional effort to curate the community," he says.

For Simone Rothman, founder of FutureAir, an early-stage startup designing an environmentally friendly air conditioner that will reduce the amount of  carbon emissions usually produced by such equipment, this community has been a major plus. "I was just talking to someone here who's an engineer working on another project and who wanted to talk about my startup," she says. "It's the kind of friendly energy that's very helpful."

Like many coworking sites, especially those formed around a social mission, Civic Hall offers space people can work in and also in which events can be held. Upcoming gatherings include CodeAcross NYC, a two-day conference aimed at teaching participants how to use and interpret New York City's open data and then giving them the opportunity to create tools for better understanding that data, and a panel discussion about the Internet and political change. Also, a long list of partners, from the New York Public Library to New York Tech Meetup, will  present programming at the space.

Membership levels for individuals range from the "community" option, which includes invitations to Civic Hall member-only events, access to members, mentors and partners, and other benefits, to "full-time", with 24/7 use of the space and 12 hours of conference room time per month, among other features. Enterprises with more than three people are eligible for organizational membership packages.

The coworking space includes places to work, as you'd expect, along with small conference rooms and old-fashioned telephone booths in which to make phone calls. There are 140 seats. You can't rent a permanent desk but, says Rasiej,"If we get to the point where all the desks are full up, that's my problem."

Certainly there are other coworking spaces for social enterprises in New York City, such as Social Innovation Centre and Impact Hub NYC. (I've written about them here and here). But their focus is different from Civic Hall's.