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!
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] >.
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We often think of The Cloud as an amorphous, invisible atmosphere. In reality, it is made of heavy metal, server rooms, wires, and massive amounts of heat. Right now, NYC's data infrastructure, in particular, data centers, are housed in corporate-owned industrial warehouses (often states away) that are heavily secured and require massive energy and water expenditures.
In this speculative design workshop, we ask: What if we could see and touch our data infrastructure? What if it lived in our neighborhood parks, schools, or community gardens instead of far away warehouses? What if your neighborhood's digital history was stored in a community archive that you helped manage?
This session is a creative laboratory. We will begin with a brief presentation that introduces the issues data centers pose to rural and urban communities, and why speculative design is a powerful tool for challenging existing narratives about the inevitability of the growth of corporate-owned data centers. Then, the bulk of our time will be spent collaging and zine-making. Participants will use multi media materials (images of server racks, garden vines, local architecture, and solar panels) to design a "Data Center" that actually serves their block and to write and record stories to go along with their designs. No technical background is required, only a desire to reclaim the digital future for physical communities.
