BY MIRANDA NEUBAUER
Councilmember and congressional candidate Julie Won called for the expansion of free internet offerings and stepped up AI training during a panel discussion as part of civic technology group BetaNYC’s School of Data at CUNY Law School in Long Island City on Saturday March 28th.
This year’s conference marked the conclusion of the tenth annual city-wide Open Data Week, a collaboration between BetaNYC and the City’s Technology and Data agencies that began in 2017 to celebrate the five year passage of the city’s landmark open data law in 2012. The two-day event saw its largest attendance yet with 688 attendees at the nearly fifty panels and discussions on Saturday and around 200 attendees at the “Unschool of Data” Unconference on Sunday, where participants could propose and vote on their own sessions, including some focused on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises of free buses and rent freezes.
During a panel on “Building the Public Interest Workforce,” Won recalled her own path to elected office as an unlikely one. When her technology service job was put on hold at the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, she got involved in organizing meal deliveries to public school students when schools switched to remote learning, driven by her own experience growing up as a public school student facing hunger at home on days off for federal holidays.
While making those deliveries, she witnessed elementary and middle school students outside LinkNYC kiosks for five to six hours a day because they could not afford Internet at home. Feeling enraged by what she had seen, she began calling every elected official, from Chuck Schumer down to her state senator and assemblymember.
“And when I looked at every single person’s platform, none of them had Wi-Fi or digital connectivity as part of their platform,” she said. “And I thought it was just outrageous because if the government is the one telling you to go to school online, get your telehealth online, get your government services online, go to work online, apply for a job online, yet we don’t have internet access for low-income New Yorkers. That’s criminal. It should be a utility just like heat, hot water, and electricity.”
“So that’s what catapulted me into the race without really the intention of winning,” she continued. “That wasn’t a goal for us. It was just how do we make Internet for All a platform for everybody who’s in office or running for office to get the conversation started.”
Six months after winning, she noted that every single NYCHA resident in her district got free Internet, cable TV and unlimited call and text, a program that three years later expanded city-wide as the Big Apple Connect program with an 80 percent adoption rate.
Won is chair of the newly formed Council Committee on Workforce Development, and is seeking to partner with technology training programs Per Scholas and Pursuit to develop an AI Corps modeled on Americorps to address an historical level of “job stagnation.” She also called for restoring free access to CUNY for New York residents, building on previous $10 million in funding for CUNY for students reentering higher education.
She said public schools couldn’t afford to wait to implement an AI curriculum until all existing teachers are trained. “If we wait that long, all those students will be too late and our workforce will be too late,” she said. “We just need to bring in a teacher who is already trained in that expertise to supplement the other teachers.”
