For new Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, all politics is hyperlocal.

The former City Council member took over the borough president’s office just a couple of weeks ago. The walls of Brewer’s office in the iconic New York City Municipal building are still bare, but her agenda is already chalked full.

“We are going to take some of the things that we did in the council and make them bigger,” said Brewer, who for 12 years represented the Upper West Side in the City Council. “It is retail work. You have to be very detail oriented. And that’s how you do it.”

Brewer at her inauguration festivities earlier this month. Photo: Annaliese Wiederspahn

At the center of her full plate is a plan to arm the borough’s 12 community boards with data and technology, to help the volunteer boards more effectively keep a watch on neighborhoods’ quality of life, government services and more.

The project builds on one of Brewer’s big wins on the City Council: New York City’s open data law, which requires all city agencies to make public data freely available online.

“I call Gale Brewer the godmother of open data and open government,” says Noel Hidalgo, executive director of the civic hacker group BetaNYC. “That law has pioneered many other open data practices.”

Now, Brewer is preparing to team up with groups like Hidalgo’s to generate tools and training for community board members, making it possible for them to use newly available information to build stronger neighborhoods.

“We are going to put tech people to work with the community boards, all 12 of them. That’s something we couldn’t do on the council,” says Brewer. “Community boards might have one person who knows something about the data, who is a volunteer on the board. I can promise you, the staff know very little.”

Community boards are New York City government at its most retail. Each community board consists of up to 50 volunteers appointed to advise the City Council and borough president on the pressing needs of each neighborhood; their work is supported by three staff members at each board. These civic-minded New Yorkers often lack the technical skills to use valuable available datasets such as traffic load on neighborhood streets, parking regulations, or crime statistics. New York City’s open data trove could also benefit community boards as they formulate capital budget priorities, which they submit to New York City’s Office of Management and Budget.

“I would love to have a tool where I could get a complete online routing of decision making like you get with FedEx or UPS,” said Community Board 2 Chair David Gruber, whose jurisdiction includes Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown. “We don’t know when we send resolutions off where it goes and why it gets funded or doesn’t get funded.”

Gruber said that community boards sometimes feel they have an intuitive understanding of what’s going on in the neighborhood. Having access to interactive maps and tools, he says, can help board members test their assumptions and plan smarter.

The civic tech community appears to be on board with Brewer’s effort to arm community boards with information. BetaNYC is holding a series of meetups this month and next to generate ideas and begin the process of building tech tools for community boards as well as the City Council. At a “Code Across NYC” civic hackathon set for Feb. 22 and 23, computer programmers will build prototypes of tools that community board members and others without coding experience can use to understand and apply neighborhood data.

Brewer was once a member of Community Board 7, and as a council member she continued to work with the board. When developers proposed the Riverside Center real estate project, for example, Brewer and CB7 successfully bargained to add public open space, a new school and affordable housing to the mix.

“She has solid experience on both sides of the issue of access to community data. She knows what’s like inside an agency and as a board member,” said Steven Romalewski, open data guru and director of the City University of New York’s Mapping Service. “She’s got a really good holistic perspective and she’s much more interested in seeing the issue succeed than getting credit.”

Friends and fellow elected officials say that such ambitions — and the work ethic and assertive personality to back them up — are classic Brewer.

“From time to time I find the phrase ‘force of nature’ appropriate to define someone, and Gale Brewer rises to that level,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in remarks at Brewer’s inauguration.

At the same event, Public Advocate Letitia James called the new borough president “a modern-day Eleanor Roosevelt.”

At her inauguration, where she could have just basked in the limelight, the new borough president busily encouraged guests to get involved in civic life, be it through the community boards or simply by passing along the names of promising young people to serve as interns in her office.

Those interns will have plenty of work to do. With little official power and a modest budget, as borough president Brewer is promising to improve constituent services, expand arts instruction and mental health services in schools, and even increase the number of minority and women-owned businesses boroughwide.

Each year New York City sets goals for the share of city contracts that go to minority and women-owned businesses. Each year those goals are largely unmet. Brewer plans to monitor city contracts and development projects and advocate to increase the number going to MWBEs, as well as to small local businesses.

The Borough President’s office also plans to open a street-level office to help Manhattan residents navigate city government.

“Constituent issues are not done well in this city,” says Brewer. “People go from agency to agency, person to person to person. They can stop with us and we will make it happen.”