NYC hopes data updates will cut help requests, ready city for AI

New York City’s top tech officials are hoping to drive down requests to the city’s Open Data Help Desk and ready city datasets for use in artificial intelligence systems.

On Sept. 19, the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation released its 2024 Open Data Report, which included highlights about the office’s work and details on new city datasets. The new datasets include information on how agencies are using AI tools, capital improvement projects and flood vulnerability mapping.

The announcement also featured a call for public comments on planned updates to the city’s technical standards manual, a set of open data standards, processes and guidelines for city agencies that publish their data. One of those updates makes dataset consolidation a standard, to avoid duplicating efforts.

New York City Chief Analytics Officer Martha Norrick, who leads the Office of Data Analytics, told StateScoop data consolidation has been a big project in the technology office. She said it’s part of the city’s open data strategic plan, which lays out a decade’s worth of initiatives designed to improve user experience, strengthen the city’s capacity and build communities through open data.

“This has been a big initiative of ours this last year, to take datasets where maybe we have like five datasets, each with one year’s worth of data in it, and put them together into a much more sort of usable, consolidated view of data around really important topics,” Norrick said.

Norrick said she hopes that consolidation will reduce the number of requests to the city’s open data help desk, which fields residents’ inquiries about the city’s open data program. Norrick said this will also make the city’s data more accessible.

“Less looking for information, less need to contact the data owner for questions, and more time for really getting into the nuts and bolts of the data,” she said.

Norrick said the open data help desk this fiscal year received more than 1,000 inquiries about 186 datasets, across nearly every city agency, roughly the same as last year.

She said the Office of Data Analytics also released several new datasets over the last year. One was an annual report, released last March in compliance with a state law, showing how agencies are using AI, including information on which datasets and vendors are involved.

Norrick said part of the reason the city is consolidating its datasets is because of AI. She said the city’s Office of Data Analytics doesn’t keep track or require users to disclose that they’re feeding city data to AI models, the anticipation of that possibility is why the city is publishing user guides along with datasets. She said those guides allow inform users of what datasets contain, which can help prevent biased outcomes from the use of AI systems.

“We’re very aware of the fact that the data that we provide publicly via open data can be used for lots of different purpose — used for research, it can be used to in algorithmic tools,” she said. “It can be used for all sorts of different things, and I think that’s why we really are spending a lot of time thinking about how to make sure that people who are using data that’s available on open data really understand what that data is and what it represents. … We’re really working to make this data accessible to folks who are using it and providing that really robust information to go along with the data about how to use it, how to understand it, how to share that so folks who are using this data really get all of the insightful juice out of it.”