2018 Examination and Verification – Request for Public Comment on SBS, DOT, & BIC Dataset Inventories
Local Law 8 of 2016 requires the
Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics to examine three agencies annually to verify
their compliance with the NYC Open Data Law. The law also requires MODA to
“accept suggestions from the public as to possible public data sets within
mayoral agencies that have not yet been disclosed.”
The Open Data Examination and Verification Survey is based on Local Law 8 of 2016 and is intended to help City agencies uncover datasets that may not already be on the Open Data Portal (ODP) or scheduled for future release in their Open Data Plans. In 2018, the Department of Small Business Services (SBS), Department of Transportation (DOT), and Business Integrity Commission (BIC) were required to complete this survey, which includes:
● Agency Overview: High-level description of the agency, the types of data it collects, and technical systems
● Current Inventory: Inventory and data quality questionnaire for datasets already on the Open Data Portal
● MMR: Inventory of Mayor’s Management Report (MMR) indicators and underlying datasets
● Reports: Inventory of legally mandated reports and underlying datasets
● Shared: Inventory of datasets shared between agencies for operational purposes
● FOIL: Inventory of datasets used to respond to freedom of information law (FOIL) requests
● Websites: Inventory of datasets regularly updated on agency websites
● Future Releases: Updates to agencies’ Open Data Plans for future dataset releases
Agencies were required to report whether each dataset identified in these inventories is a “public dataset” according to the definition in the Open Data Law, and if not, a reason why. Agencies submitted these workbooks in July 2018 as part of the 2018 Open Data Plan.
Request for Public Comment
The surveys for SBS, DOT, and BIC are available for review here: https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-EV-Draft-Surveys-for-Comment-1.zip
The public is invited to submit feedback on agencies’ workbooks until 11:59pm on Wednesday October 17, 2018 in this webform. You may use this form to:
- Request a dataset you believe to be maintained by the agency but not already in the Open Data Plan
- Identify what you believe to be an omission from any section of the agency’s dataset inventory
- Disagree with the agency’s reported rationale for why any dataset is or is not public
- Ask a question about something reported in the survey, including questions on existing datasets on the Open Data Portal or datasets scheduled for future release
While requests for new datasets are accepted for any agency at any time the NYC Open Data Help Desk, DOT, SBS, and BIC will be required to respond to questions and feedback as part of the official Examination and Verification process. These questions and agency responses will be included in an Appendix in the 2018 Open Data Examination and Verification Report, which will be released on December 1, 2018.