Ariel Kennan named BetaNYC's Public Interest Technologist of the Month

BetaNYC has named Ariel Kennan, President of the Axiom Foundation, its Public Interest Technologist of the Month. Noel Hidalgo’s feature traces a career spent closing the gap between the policy we pass and the services people actually receive — a Code for America fellowship that, in Ariel’s words, “showed me where to apply my skills and started teaching me the language of government”; founding and leading the Service Design Studio at NYC Opportunity in the Mayor’s Office; and building the Digital Benefits Network at Georgetown’s Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation.

Asked what advice to give the next generation of public interest technologists, the answer was candid about institutional change: “This work takes time...it’s changing culture and human behavior that’s hard.”

The Axiom Foundation is a bet that some of that time can now be collapsed. Encoding the law used to be bounded by human bandwidth — one statute, one analyst, one system at a time. AI changes that limit, and Axiom is built to expand on it: open, machine-readable encodings of the world’s rules, starting with tax and benefit policy, published at the scale of the law itself so that anyone can run, audit, or reform them. Culture still moves at its own pace. The infrastructure underneath it no longer has to.

Read the full feature at beta.nyc.