NYC vs. NYS Open Data Transparency

The focus here is on "harm exposure dashboards" which focus on everyday concerns -- roads, crime, restaurants, schools. Budget and zoning each warrant a place-based explorer of their own, which we'll be building separately. Nationwide real-time networks like PurpleAir span every jurisdiction at once, which puts them outside a city-versus-state comparison.

First, the city usually leads. Where both jurisdictions publish, the city's dashboard tends to be finer and fresher. Residents outside the five boroughs fall back on the state's — for traffic and restaurant inspections a usable state version exists, but for much else the capability is thin, or it's unclear whether the state offers it at all.

Second, there is lag in the data and it's not clearly disclosed. For example, the city provides detailed dataset pages underlying each graph and dashboard; some of them are marked as "updated daily" -- yet their contents list being updated a few weeks ago. Additionally a dataset's refresh rate isn't the inspection rate behind it — an establishment is inspected only every so often, so a posted result can be old on a dashboard that refreshed this morning; what the reader needs, and rarely gets, is how often the underlying inspections actually happen. The NYPD dashboards show a last-updated date but no cadence and no next-publication date. NYSED reporting runs more than a year behind with no explanation for the delay.

Third — and this one is a pattern we're still evaluating, not a firm conclusion — dashboards are hard to find. We found many dashboards through a Google search; this was far easier than trying to find via an agency's front page. deep, and they rarely surface on an agency's front page or in its press. We want to quantify this before drawing a conclusion. Some of the burial is ordinary — any leader wants to control the timing and framing of what gets attention, and that's part of the job, not evidence of bad faith — but with greater findability, the dashboards would invite more use and more scrutiny, improving their quality.