During the first weekend of March, the New York City School of Data, a network of advocates, activists, and professionals for an open data ecosystem, hosted a day of panels and workshop sessions in recognition of the international day celebrating open data and the fourth anniversary of the city passing its first Open Data Law.
Late last year, the City Council approved the final bills of a package amending and adding to the 2012 Open Data Law, which created the Open Data Portal, but the legislative action has been met with mixed reviews and questions about the Portal’s effectiveness remain.
The Portal is intended to increase information available to the public about City services and Government operations. According to the de Blasio administration, “New Yorkers can use this data to make informed decisions, become more engaged in their communities, solve tough problems, or turn their dreams into a reality.” Data available includes the extent to which City school buildings are being used, taxi trip pickups and dropoffs, tree censuses, requests made to the City’s 311 help line, general City budget spending, and much more.
The two newest laws seek to ensure city agency compliance with the Open Data Law, particularly regarding timely release of data, and updates to the Open Data Portal with information released through Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests.
On Nov. 30 of last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law the five prior bills from the Open Data package. The Open Data Law and Portal are part of efforts to make Government transparent and accountable. In theory, data is to be made easily available, and in a useful format, for interested parties, who can use it to help solve City problems. The Portal currently offers 1,400 data sets through dozens of City agencies and other entities.
While there is a wealth of information available, and hundreds of data sets still to come online, it is not always clear who uses the Open Data Portal and to what end. How many New Yorkers even know about the availability of so much data? And, getting back to usability, there are also significant questions about the format in which data sets are often published. Still, Open Government advocates continue to say that it is an essential feature and push to see it improved. Public, usable data, they say, is key to holding Government accountable and opening up policy-making to a broader audience, including people outside of Government able to help solve a wide variety of problems.
BetaNYC, a nonpartisan group comprised of civic hackers and technologists that has worked with Government actors to improve the City’s embrace of civic tech and open data, features a digital project list currently being developed by the NYC tech community. HeatSeekNYC, a web-enabled hardware platform to detect heating violations in NYC, and NYC Bus Adherence, tools for analyzing and visualizing MTA Bus performance data, are two examples of data-based projects moving civic discourse.
Since the passage of the 2012 Open Data Law, there have been other modifications. In 2014, de Blasio signed into law two transparency bills which require the City Record, a daily publication of City business, to be published on the Open Data Portal in a machine-readable format; the City Charter, the Administrative Code, and the Rules of the City of New York to be published online; and the compilation of laws updated within 30 days of any change.
In July 2015, the de Blasio administration released a new plan for the Portal, Open Data for All, which emphasizes community partnership and focuses on making data sets accessible and user-friendly for all New Yorkers.
Technical and community engagement challenges remain as the Open Data Portal continues to be refined and expanded. It is one often lower-profile way in which the de Blasio administration’s reputation for Government transparency and effectiveness will be formed.
There are technical challenges for the Open Data Portal. “There are currently many challenges,” said Ben Wellington, visiting Assistant Professor in the City & Regional Planning program at The Pratt Institute and creator of the increasingly popular data science and policy blog I Quant NY. “One of them is the wide use of PDF documents. PDF is inherently difficult to analyze, so when an agency is forced to release data but doesn’t necessarily want to have it widely used, PDF is an opportune way to do that.“
PDF documents, unlike an Excel spreadsheet, are not in machine-readable format, which Wellington and others argue creates a long-term problem for civic technologists who end up spending a large amount of their time extracting data rather than analyzing it.
City Council Member and Chair of the Committee on Technology, James Vacca, has concerns regarding another aspect of City data. Quality and the timely release of data from City agencies leaves much to be desired. Vacca sponsored a bill passed by the City Council and signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, which mandates a City office or agency examine the compliance of Mayoral agencies posting public data sets under the Open Data Law. “Some agencies are not as diligent as they should be when it comes to posting information, there has to be good coordination among the city agencies,” Vacca explained. “Right now, there really is no enforcement mechanism if agencies don’t comply. We are dependent upon cooperation, which is great, but we need an enforcement mechanism.“ Wellington suggests that a position should be created in every City agency, an “open data liaison”, to act as a point of contact for the public and be responsible for any inquiries about information released by the agency. “Today, there’s no way for the public to understand who’s responsible for any dataset,” Wellington noted, which can only further obfuscate any process of data clarification, sourcing or transparency.
The New York City Transparency Working Group (NYCTWG), a collection of civic technologists, data advocates, and Good Government groups, has argued that FOIL requests should be published online through a centralized tracking system akin to the Open Data Portal. Earlier this month, the de Blasio administration launched “the OpenRECORDS Portal.” It is “designed to streamline the process of submitting, tracking, and responding to FOIL record requests as we work toward becoming a more transparent and effective government,” the Mayor’s press office said in an announcement.
Along with Vacca’s bill, another also approved by the City Council and signed by the Mayor requires agencies to individually review all data released through FOIL requests and determine if the information should be posted on the Open Data Portal. The thinking goes that if one person or group is interested in a certain data set, others probably are, and that if the information is being released publicly in one sense, why not make it generally available.
In 2013, then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio released a transparency report card in which he called for a mandate to publish online the most commonly-sought information through FOIL requests, asserting “proactive disclosure will save time and resources by posting minutes, public schedules and license data online for easy access.” As Mayor, it took de Blasio some time, testing the patience of open data advocates, but he has now launched a systematized and centralized portal for FOIL requests.
Noel Hidalgo, Co-Founder and Executive Director of BetaNYC, believes that Open Data for All is helping to facilitate more public involvement in the Open Data Portal and wants open data to be used regularly to solve civic problems. “We’re at the point [with open data] where it’s not just about making an app but about making a culture, an understanding of how to use data for improving New York,” Hidalgo said.
Last year, Mayor de Blasio announced a public-private partnership to launch Computer Science for All, a computer science education program for every city public school student. As a new generation of students learn web design and coding technologies, Hidalgo hopes it will translate to increased interest and participation in civic hacking. “We fundamentally believe that there is an opportunity to enhance digital literacy through civic education and we would love to see that embedded within the computer science program,” Hidalgo said on behalf of BetaNYC.
One essential question for open data is whether it is being used beyond the Ben Wellingtons and Noel Hidalgos of the world. In other words, are community activists and those without advanced data science training using the city data?
Juan Camilo Osorio, Director of Research at the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), says, like Hidalgo, that a cultural shift is necessary to understand the capacity for individuals to be involved in an open data ecosystem. Osorio wants to challenge the model that community organizations function only for public outreach. “These organizations are part of community-based planning and can do research provided with the right technical and financial resources,” he said. Osorio thinks the Open Data Portal has great potential to be used by community organizers - not just computer programmers or data analysts.
Moreover, he believes the City has a bigger responsibility beyond publishing information on the Portal: “It’s not just about opening access, [in order to use it] you still have to know what is the right agency that would have the data you need and then you will also need to have the basic capacity to process that data. The city should going a few steps further providing the tools and training to learn how to work with that information.”
City Council Member Ben Kallos, a software developer and long-time advocate for Government transparency who now Chairs the Council’s Governmental Operations committee, agrees that free trainings should be offered for New Yorkers interested in learning how to use the Open Data Portal. He suggests partnering with the City’s three public library systems (New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library) to train librarians who can teach patrons to use the Open Data Portal as a research resource. Featuring the Open Data Portal on library websites and other logical online research centers would be helpful in expanding usership and public awareness.
Kallos acknowledged that New Yorkers must have basic access in order to use the Open Data Portal. “I want to make sure that every low-income New Yorker has access to free and affordable broadband and low-cost computers. That would mean everyone in Public Housing (NYCHA) should have free broadband and that anyone who is low-income should have an affordable internet plan,” Kallos said. “In order to have a modern government, we need to make sure that everyone can connect.”
Dr. Mashariki, of the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, certainly sees the Portal as a long-term work in progress. “There’s no day I foresee where we stop and say you know, the portal is perfect and it’s at its most usable and we’ve expanded to it the point where we can’t expand it anymore,” he said. “This is always going to be a strategy that we’re going to have to adapt and adopt as needed to ensure new uses and new capabilities.”
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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