How open is it? The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it’s always under attack.
Increasingly, the City of New York has embraced several open methodologies that contribute to good internet health. This has included a push towards ensuring that technologies are interoperable and allow for public scrutiny and collective action. One of the most notable examples is the City’s Open Data efforts. In March of 2012, the City Council passed the Open Data Law, mandating that City agencies and departments make City data freely available.
This effort, in collaboration with the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT), is managed by the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA), led by the City’s Chief Analytics Officer Kelly Jin. MODA builds programs with a mission of Open Data for All, meaning that the City’s Open Data programs are designed to benefit every kind of New Yorker. Each spring, MODA also hosts Open Data Week, a series of events that celebrate NYC’s Open Data Law and raise awareness about NYC Open Data. Among MODA’s 2018 highlights: 200+ civic engagement commitments made by more than 60 agencies, and 1.2 million visitors to NYC Open Data, the city's data hub.
NYCx Co-Labs are neighborhood-based partnerships that combine technology piloting and education in high-need, high-opportunity neighborhoods. Originally known as The Neighborhood Innovation Labs, and announced by the White House as part of the Obama administration’s “Smart Cities Initiative” in 2015, NYCx Co-Labs is a partnership between The Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and NYC Economic Development Corporation. The program brings together a set of partners — from government, local non-profit organizations, technology companies — through various events, workshops, and community spaces to accelerate research and development of new technologies that can improve city life. In 2017, in partnership with four City agencies, NYCx launched the first two Co-Lab Challenges in Brownsville, Brooklyn: Safe and Thriving Nighttime Corridors and Zero Waste in Public Spaces. Wherever a Co-Lab is set up, a group of community-based organizations are assembled to guide local programming. In this way, NYCx Co-labs promotes inclusive community-driven innovation by empowering community members to co-research, co-design, and co-implement solutions to local challenges, democratizing and opening innovation.
To support and build upon the City’s open data programming, the nonprofit group BetaNYC has become a prominent player, with a mission to improve lives in NYC through civic design, technology, and data. To date, BetaNYC has supported countless open data events and projects, linking city government and the community. Most recently, the organization launched the NYC Civic Innovation Lab and Fellowship, a program that partners Civic Tech fellows with Community Boards to improve their civic engagement practices using technology.
There are a number of additional programs that are growing in the City of New York that are built on open principles. In 2015, the Mayor’s Office of the CTO released the first ever IoT guidelines for cities deploying new smart city technologies. These guidelines focus on privacy, transparency, data management, infrastructure, security, operations, and sustainability. Importantly, these guidelines are part of a broader goal to ensure that all new IoT technologies are interoperable and that cities and vendors are transparent in their deployment and use. Making “smart” cities more open and transparent is the first step to making them more ethical, too.
Since 2016, NYC’s technology community has been served by Tech:NYC, a nonprofit that connects startups and increases their ability to understand and contribute to policy conversations that affect the industry. Tech:NYC regularly holds events and shares information that give insights into how technology policy is developed in NYC.
In 2017, the Mayor’s Office of the CTO started the NYCx, a program that invites entrepreneurs technologists, and tech professionals to participate in open competitions. Through NYCx, the City works with agencies and communities to identify important challenges, and then packages these as opportunities for the tech community to solve. To date, NYCx has launched five challenges, ranging from improving cybersecurity capacity for NYC small businesses to bringing new broadband solutions to disconnected geographies.
NYC Open Records is a project out of the Department of Records and Information Services and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Built upon source code from a similar project from Oakland, California, Open Records offers a quick and easy way for the public to submit Freedom of Information requests (FOIL) to an agency, and to see the status of requests.
Finally, NYC Planning Labs is a new division out of the NYC Department of City Planning that embraces open technology, agile development, and user-centered design to built impactful products with NYC’s Urban Planners. NYC Planning Labs is built upon four main principles: open by default; ship early, ship often; build with, not for; and document and disseminate. To date, they have built 10 major applications maintained with dozens of open source repositories at github.com/nycplanning.
“data is the oxygen of the internet”
Adrienne Schmoeker is the Deputy Chief Analytics Officer and Director of Civic Engagement & Strategy for the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MoDA), a small team of data scientists and strategists created to ensure that NYC is responsibly data-driven in the pursuit of offering better public services and transparency to citizens. Local laws mandate that every city agency has an Open Data Coordinator, and NYC now has more than 2,200 data sets on its Open Data portal with an average of 30,000 visits per week.
Tell us about your work.
I build relationships for open data. By understanding what analytics looks like across NYC’s many agencies – from parks and buildings to transportation and education – we surface common challenges and opportunities that using open data can address.
Working with 100+ Open Data Coordinators, one at every single agency, commission and office, and through initiatives like the Analytics Exchange (an internal network of analysts and city staff), we bring folks together to showcase and share projects. This approach results in initiatives like the open analytics library. The diversity of use cases for open data is really inspiring. Right now, there are more than 300,000 people who work for the City, 60,000+ nonprofits, and 8.6 million people who call NYC their home. Helping people see that open data can be a government transparency tool means they can keep the City accountable in terms of how we operate on everything from street lights to sewage.
And parking tickets. One of my favorite stories is from Ben Wellington, a data scientist who runs a blog called I Quant NY. He analyzed parking ticket data from the Department of Finance and mapped places with the highest number of grossing parking tickets near fire hydrants. Ben went to the highest grossing parking spot, on the Lower East Side, and noticed a confusing street designation: there was a fire hydrant, a curb extension, and then a parking spot. Because it was far from the fire hydrant, people wrongly assumed it was fine to park there. Everyone who parked there would get a ticket! Ben wrote to the Department of Transportation. He assumed nothing would happen, but a few weeks later, they had added new roadway markings that made the “no-parking” designation clear. This is a concrete example of an improvement happening because of an individual who wanted to learn more about how their City worked and was equipped with open data to investigate and propose a solution.
What are you proud of?
I am very proud of the steady pace of culture change around the importance of data at the city agency level. A few years ago, we measured success by the number of datasets we had published, but not the number of people reached or how they were using data. In 2015, we announced Open Data for All, which recognized that offering open data to New Yorkers is a “digital-first government service,” not just merely a compliance initiative. An amendment was passed into law recently that says open data will be offered in perpetuity. That means new data is going to be created. The inventory won’t be static and stale, it’s going to evolve.
What barriers persist for open data – locally and beyond?
There is a significant digital and data literacy curve, and functionality and discoverability also remain crucial challenges to be addressed. For instance, how do you make it easier to find the very latest open data from the NYPD? Another challenge is where transparency and privacy intersect. The public has a right to know who our vendors are for example, but this can lead to having personal names and addresses in the open data sets; constant questions to weigh. As of now, privacy determinations are made at the agency level and with new guidance from the Mayor’s Office of Information Privacy and Agency Privacy Officers. We have to ask, “What should be redacted?” It’s a constant conversation, and we learn from mistakes quickly.
How can NYC be an active partner in this work?
Open data would not be where it is if we didn’t have demand from the public – from organizations like Civic Hall or BetaNYC or groups like the Open Sewer Conservancy – to actually use it. NYC can help cultivate that demand, and people can keep asking for it. That makes such a difference.
I am also excited about the new Chief Privacy Officer role and the Mayor’s Office of Information Privacy. Every agency now has an Agency Privacy Officer. We want Open Data Coordinators to work closely with them to determine best practices around privacy and security and to be as open as we can possibly be.
Final Word
In the same way we are responsible for our individual physical health, like going to the gym and eating healthy, we need to think about our health regimen for operating on the internet. Data is a big piece of that. In addition to our individual responsibilities, there are societal ones as well. Data is the oxygen of the internet; we need make sure what benefits us as individuals, corporations, and governments doesn’t ever harm others.
For the internet to be healthy, we need educated constituents and users. By making data produced by city agencies available to the public – city staff, nonprofits, data journalists, advocates, entrepreneurs, and communities – we create a pathway into understanding how government works, and idealistically, to enable democracy.
“the future of a strong, open, and secure internet is the future of our democratic society”
Noel Hidalgo is the Executive Director of BetaNYC, one of the nation’s largest civic organizations dedicated to improving lives in New York through civic design, technology, and open data. Among its initiatives, BetaNYC known for the People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City. Developed through a participatory listening tour in partnership with the City, this document engaged over 500 New Yorkers in its design, shaping BetaNYC’s community values. It has also led to new proposed legislation, laws, and public-private partnerships that model open data practices in the digital era. A bedrock of NYC’s Civic Tech community, Noel fights for greater transparency, meaningful civic engagement, and better open data laws by organizing communities to leverage public data for their own empowerment.
Tell us about your work.
BetaNYC started as a meet-up and evolved into an community organization with over 5,000 members. We help evolve open data, civic design, and technology in government operations. We do this through 250 annual community events that include hack nights, theme-based salons, capacity-building work, and free, public, open-data trainings. For example, we work closely with the Manhattan Borough President and Community Boards throughout NYC to build curricula that effectively help New Yorkers utilize open data. We also partner with local public universities to develop Civic Innovation Labs, a service corps that trains local university students to leverage open data. Most recently, we helped to establish a CTO role in all community boards to promote the use of open data and to draw more designers, technologists, and data scientists to community boards. And once a year we host BetaNYC’s School of Data Conference, which kicks off the City’s annual weeklong open data celebration. It’s really important these two things happen together: it’s not enough to just release data – New Yorkers also need tools and opportunities to use this data for personal and professional empowerment.
Looking ahead, BetaNYC can address a broader array of issues that affect internet health. For example, in the latest iteration of the People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York, which emerged through a year of active listening and engagement with New Yorkers from all backgrounds, we outlined four universal digital freedoms: to connect, to learn, to innovate, and to collaborate. The Roadmap has brought 14 ideas into legislation, nine signed into law, and another nine have become public-private partnerships – from a digital, open source platform to track all FOIA requests to expansion of the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, for example.
What are you are proud of?
I’ve worked on a number of open government and civic tech initiatives, but the one I am most proud of is working with New York’s City Council to pass the City’s first Open Data Law. One of the strongest open data laws in the country, it has helped advance open data through successive legislation. Since its passage, the City has released over 2,000 data sets. This work was possible through Beta NYC and a coalition of good government groups networked together as the NYC transparency working group, spearheaded by Reinvent Albany.
And here’s why open data is so important in real terms – right now, NYC is facing a dramatic affordable housing crisis. Because of NYC’s Open Data Law, tenant and affordable housing advocacy organizations were able to leverage access to previously unavailable data to analyze tax information, property, construction permits, building violations, and 311 service requests. This directly led to the creation of things like Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development's Displacement Alert Map and JustFix's Who Owns What Tool. Using this information, community organizations are doing critical work going door-to-door and protecting the limited amount of affordable housing left in the city.
What challenges persist to having better open data practices – locally and beyond?
One problem is that government procurement is an extremely difficult and lengthy process, so we need to make sure that all of the city leaders that influence technology see the value and impact of open data programs, and continue to invest in the growth of this movement.
How can NYC be an active partner in this work?
NYC has many resources that can enhance our impacts. For example, we would love to partner with the City’s public libraries to hold public programming that empowers New Yorkers to utilize open data to improve their communities. The City is also doing more to build tools through open frameworks and open source. Through open technology practices, New Yorkers can provide open feedback and directly address underlying problems inherent in technology creation.
Final Word
Recently, a ballot proposal to establish a civic engagement commission was passed. Their mission includes expanding language access at polling sites, developing a more significant city-wide participatory budgeting program (PBP), and partnering with community organizations in their civic engagement efforts. An office like this can champion public engagement practices, listen at scale, and help address issues in a concrete way. A small coalition has already started to emerge to shape technical support for community boards, including ways to better access and use open data, CRM databases, and digital and civic engage practices more broadly. The future of a strong, open, and secure internet is really the future of our democratic society.