Launch day: opening the doors on New Institution

Today we’re opening the doors on New Institution — a fully digital, AI-powered public service rebuild that has been in the making for four years. If you’re reading this, you are among the first 1.2 million residents to hold accounts, and the first to hold us accountable to the published service-level agreements.

Why rebuild from scratch?

Previous public-service portals layered digital interfaces on top of paper-era processes. The result was brittle — every form still duplicated ten times across departments, every request still retyped, every status still hidden behind a phone tree. The only way to fix it was to rebuild the underlying process, not the interface.

What’s live today

• 180+ services, reorganized around resident life moments rather than department boundaries.
• Civic Assistant — a conversational AI that cites every answer to primary source.
• Radical transparency — every dataset, every decision, every audit, open by default.
• Legally binding SLAs with automatic refunds on miss.

Public service should be the easiest thing a resident ever does. Not the hardest.

From our Charter, Article I

What happens next

We continue rolling services out through 2026. We will publish a monthly dispatch here with changes, incidents, and decisions. Every piece of this is open to public comment — and every word of our source code is on GitHub. Talk to you next month.