“Open data for all sounds nice, but data doesn’t explain itself. You need interpreters and activists using the data to create stories. Hopefully if people have tools to use the data the stories will come out.”

Background

Kent has been passionate about civic tech since he discovered it while studying Urban Planning at University of Pennsylvania. After taking a class in GIS, he improved his data skills through YouTube videos and online forums—finding a Facebook group of Philadelphia-based technologists especially helpful. After working as an urban planner in Philadelphia for a few years he moved to New York City.

In New York, he attended monthly meetups of people working in civic tech in the city, such as those organized by BetaNYC and Civic Hall. At one of those events he met the founder of the civic mapping startup where he currently works. He values the opportunity to merge his interests in urban planning and civic tech through his job.

Kent stays up to date with events and projects in the local civic tech community through newsletters and Slack teams. He regularly updates and builds out new side projects in Github. Most of the time, his projects are inspired by interesting datasets he comes across, but sometimes he responds to requests. Recently, someone from the Department of Education asked him to create an app to map schools with the lowest attendance levels.

Experience Using Open Data

Kent is very familiar with open data. To update, maintain, and build out the platform he develops as his day job, he pulls APIs from many sources, both open and private. Most often, he pulls City data from Zillow, PLUTO, and Big Apple Bytes. Kent worked with open datasets from the city before the portal was created, and still prefers to go straight to the source, such as the specific agency websites.

He feels that agencies have more incentive to update their own agency page, and he isn’t sure how often the portal datasets are updated or who handles quality assurance for this centralized platform. When searching for a particularly obscure dataset, he will start with a Google search rather than the data portal.

Because of the education app he recently created, he has made connections at different agencies. He relies a lot on these personal networks to get the data he needs when he can’t find it readily available on city agency websites. When he does go through the open data portal he makes sure he uses an app that his friend made to circumvent the portal’s front-end interface and download the data directly.