In September 2026, I attended the second CityCamp NYC unconference, part of a civic-event series launched by Kevin Curry and Jennifer Pahlka in Chicago in 2010. BetaNYC hosted this year’s gathering at Hunter College (CUNY), in partnership with its Department of Urban Policy and Planning.
The event was delightful, full of driven people doing prosocial work.
In one project-focused session, I was impressed by a participant reporting a null result from a vibecoded solo project. He had hypothesized an increase in reports of housing violations in the South Bronx. Would residents, feeling empowered by a more sympathetic administration, report mold conditions they had previously endured in silence? His analysis found no evidence of a “Mamdani effect.”
In The Wrong Kind of Competence, I wrote about institutions that mistrust technical workers who arrive with their own standards of proof. This project showed the better arrangement: politics supplied the question but did not get to choose the answer. His analysis found no evidence of the effect, and he said so.