Public data is for everyone

Have you ever had a question that you wanted to answer about your government or your community where data might help you answer the question?  You’re contemplating “how bad is the City’s crime rate, is it increasing or decreasing?”,   “Are streets getting safer for pedestrians?”,  “Is our Town in a better financial position than 5 years ago?”
 
Public data from your City, Town or County can help you answer your questions.  Public data is any data created by your local government related to the facts or operations of the government.  Facts would include data such as property tax information; operations data could be a list of crimes in your city or details on how your City spends money.  Our governments are continuously creating and maintaining data and it should be available for any citizen to obtain this data.
 
Importantly, New York’s Freedom of Information Law (and comparable laws in other states) make very clear that government data is OUR data, it is public data.  It is your data, it is my data, it doesn't belong solely to the City, Town or County that creates it.  If a City planner creates data and analysis - that data belongs to all of us.  If a third party contractor creates data on behalf of the City - that data belongs to all of us.
 
Public data can inform citizens and connect people to their government.  Public data can promote transparency and ensure government accountability.  Public data can be used by journalists, academics, nonprofits and companies - each according to their own interest.  
 
These are great aspirations, so what gets in the way?  We find two main issues.  The first is that local governments don't understand the value of making data proactively available.  Think of a dataset such as property tax roll data, this is data that is typically requested hundreds or thousands of times from a government in a given year.  For everyone’s benefit it makes sense to post the data on your government website for anyone to download and to make sure that it’s in a usable form - an Excel spreadsheet.  Instead we see governments requiring us to ask for the data and then to send it in a locked pdf file that can’t readily be analyzed.
 
The second issue is the responsiveness to public information or FOIL requests.  NY State FOIL law requires a very specific responsiveness to requests, measured in days.  It’s a regular occurrence to see cities ignoring responsiveness requirements. What is behind this delay or obfuscation?  There is no single answer - it’s likely a combination of lack of prioritization and lack of interest in abiding by FOIL law.  
 
How good is your City’s public data availability? You can test the ease of obtaining data from your City - try acquiring your community’s building permit listings, property tax roll or crime incident data. Go to your City’s website and do a search for the words “open data”; you will quickly identify if your government proactively makes data available on its website.  If you find nothing, search for the term “public information request”.  You may find a page with an email address or an automated system for making requests.  Whichever you find, make a request - request 5 year’s-worth of building permit listings, the most recent property tax roll or a few years of crime incident data.  Remember, it’s your data, you are entitled to ask for it, you don’t need to supply a reason.  See what happens next.  Can you get the data that you requested?  Does your City attempt to make you explain why you need the data or present other obstacles?
 
Once you acquire public data and test out your community’s public information request systems, you can answer questions with the data.  You don’t need to be a data scientist to use data to answer basic questions.  Put the data into your favorite spreadsheet program or AI tool and begin examining the data.  If you don’t know where to start, drop me an email and we can talk about your goals and ways to examine the data.
 
I’m excited to be on WAMC speaking about public data, its availability to citizens and how public data can inform all of us about our government and communities.  In future episodes I’ll walk through specific examples of studying our communities using public data.
 
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.