Name: Why NYC Needs a Community Data Portal - The Missing Half of NYC's Open Data
Start: 2026-03-28T15:45:00-0400
End: 2026-03-28T16:45:00-0400

Welcome to NYC School of Data — a community conference that demystifies the practices and policies around open data, technology, and service design. Hosted by BetaNYC at CUNY School of Law, this year’s conference concludes NYC’s Open Data Week 2026 and is the TENTH edition of both SoData and Open Data Week!

Register for tickets: < https://ti.to/betanyc/nycsodata26 >

2026 is bigger than ever with 40+ sessions organized by NYC’s civic technology, data, and design community!

Day 1: the classic NYC School of Data conference, with programming across 12 rooms during 4 session blocks.
Day 2: NEW in 2026 – UnSchool of Data! The unconference agenda is created together on the day, with attendee pitches at the top of the day. Select sessions have been pre-seeded by BetaNYC to kick things off.

Our venue is accessible and content is all-ages friendly! If you have accessibility questions or needs, please email us at < [email protected] >.

Why NYC Needs a Community Data Portal - The Missing Half of NYC's Open Data

Saturday March 28, 2026 3:45pm - 4:45pm EDT

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New York City helped invent the modern Open Data movement - launching one of the first municipal data portals, passing groundbreaking legislation, and building a civic ecosystem other cities can only envy. But NYC's portal only tells half the story. It primarily publishes data produced by City agencies, while thousands of valuable datasets about the city - created by universities, community organizations, advocacy groups, and research institutions across all five boroughs - have nowhere to go. That's not just a gap. It's a missed opportunity to unlock what Open Data can be: a shared civic resource "About Us, For Us, and By Us."

In this session, Joel Natividad (datHere) and Steven Saylor (Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center / University of Pittsburgh) will introduce the Data Intermediary model - a practical approach where a trusted civic partner operates a Data Portal alongside a city's existing infrastructure. Drawing on WPRDC's real-world experience running a regional data portal and datHere's work building open source portals, they'll walk through what a Community Data Portal for NYC could look like, how it would work with (not against) the City's current systems, and what it would take to make it happen.

This talk is for anyone invested in NYC's civic data future - open data advocates, community organizations sitting on valuable datasets with no place to publish them, City agency staff, researchers, journalists, and civic technologists. Come help shape what the next chapter of Open Data looks like for New York City!

Speakers