CNG NYC
A CNG community gathering in New York City during NYC Climate Week.
Join us in New York City for a day of talks, demos, and community at Cooper Union during NYC Climate Week. This event brings together cloud-native geospatial practitioners in one of the world’s great climate and data cities to share what they’re building and connect with the broader CNG community.
CNG NYC is part of the 2026 CNG global event series. To support the series, please see the CNG 2026 Community Partner Program.
This event is supported by:
Agenda
| Opening | ||
| 08:30 | Doors open, coffee & meet | |
| 09:00 | Welcome & Introduction | Jed SundwallRadiant Earth |
| Morning session15–20 minute talks + Q&A | ||
| 09:15 | Featured Talk: Bias Bounty Mapping Equity ChallengeWhy bias bounties matter for geospatial equity, what the challenge looks for, and how to take part. | Mala KumarHumane Intelligence |
| 09:40 | Featured Talk: Incentivizing Data Resilience Infrastructure — A Wildfire Disaster Intelligence Case StudyAn end-to-end pilot with Dryad and Source Cooperative, plus the investment case that open, distributed infrastructure beats siloed alternatives. | Dr. Katherine SkinnerInvest in Open Infrastructure |
| 10:05 | Common Space: Open Satellite Imagery as a Public GoodBuilding a community-governed satellite constellation for humanitarian Earth observation — and how its governance differs from the commercial industry. | Bill GreerCommon Space |
| 10:30 | Coffee break | |
| 11:00 | Transitioning to Cloud-Native Geospatial: Opportunities and ChallengesBuilding the Global Child Hazard Database, and what going cloud-native looks like inside an organization that isn't set up to share data easily. | Dohyung KimUNICEF |
| 11:25 | Global-Scale Biodiversity Modeling & Open-Source CNGLessons from building a global 100 m biodiversity dataset on Earth Engine, then Planetary Computer, then open-source tooling on AWS. | Francis GassertVizzuality |
| 11:50 | Lunch on your ownLunch is not provided — there are plenty of options near Cooper Union. Feel free to gather with others. | |
| Afternoon session | ||
| 13:00 | Panel: Climate Data 2.0 — Disruptive Approaches to Expanding Data for Modeling, AI Validation, and GovernanceNew capabilities for measuring the global atmosphere, where the critical gaps are, and what is already technically and financially within reach. Additional panelists to be announced. | Kelly WanserSilverLiningJoel ThorntonUniversity of Washington |
| 14:00 | BreakHallway conversation, coffee. | |
| 14:15 | Serverless Spatial Data Infrastructures with PortolanWhat if a spatial data infrastructure could just be files in a bucket? An open spec and toolkit pairing GeoParquet and COG with STAC metadata — plus a registry that makes public catalogs discoverable, by people and by agents. | Nissim LebovitsRadiant Earth |
| 14:40 | Adventures in Local-First Storage and ComputeRebuilding an offline-ready backcountry navigation app on cloud-native data: what to host yourself, what to read from public archives, and how to stay fast offline. | Nate Hearnsfolia |
| 15:05 | Coffee break | |
| 15:20 | The Last Mile of Climate Communication: Translating Cloud-Native Performance into Front-End UXJoining PMTiles vector boundaries with real-time APIs client-side in MapLibre GL JS to make flood-risk data feel instant. | Terence TuhinanshuElement 84 |
| 15:45 | How We Mapped Gold Mining Across 14 Countries in One Day Using Remote Sensing EmbeddingsThe architecture and workflow behind a one-day, continent-scale mapathon with Code for Africa and the Pulitzer Center. | Mikel MaronEarth Genome |
| Lightning talks5 minutes each | ||
| 16:10 | Speeding up Zarr-Python with Rust | Kyle BarronDevelopment Seed |
| How We Prepared HIFLD Next for the Singularity | Jeremy HerzogFulton Ring | |
| Peer Review to Headline: CNG as Infrastructure for News | Krishna KarraBloomberg | |
| Sustaining Community Engagement Through Changing Times: From STAPI to Climate Initiatives | Zoë CohenElement 84 | |
| Solving the Attention Problem in Geospatial: Lessons from Building the Modern GIS Audience | Matt ForrestWherobots | |
| Operational Flood Forecasting with Cloud-Native Geospatial Architectures | Seth LawlerDewberry | |
| Closing | ||
| 16:40 | Closing | Jed SundwallRadiant Earth |
| 17:00 | ReceptionOn the terrace, until 18:30. | |