NYC School of Data 2025

This session will explore New York City’s experience with Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) since its implementation in 2021. I will present key findings from the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s (CFB) research on the 2021 and 2023 RCV primaries, shedding light on how voters engaged with this new system.

The panel will begin with a brief history of RCV and its introduction to NYC’s special and primary elections, where it has been used to elect the Mayor, Public Advocate, Comptroller, Borough Presidents, and City Council members. We’ll explore how this voting method has shaped electoral outcomes and voter participation in the city. Attendees will also gain an understanding of the Cast Vote Record (CVR)—an anonymized dataset that captures individual ballot rankings, allowing for in-depth analysis of voter behavior. We’ll provide an overview of how CVRs are structured and how they can be used to assess the impact of RCV. Finally, we’ll examine New York City’s performance in its first two RCV primary elections. This includes insights into how voters utilized their rankings, common ballot errors, comparisons with other major cities using RCV, and the role of demographics and voting behaviors in ranking choices. Don’t miss this opportunity to deepen your understanding of NYC’s evolving electoral landscape!

With NYC open data as your raw material, join Kelly Dinneen of the BetaNYC Associate Board to learn practical techniques for drafting nonfiction comics and join a collaborative experiment in using sequential art to engage with civic data.

We'll begin by exploring a few NYC open datasets ripe for narrative and visual interpretation. Then we will discuss comic works that clarify complex systems, give voice to competing perspectives, and create unique pairings of the concrete and abstract. During the hands-on portion of the workshop, we will move through a series of iterative activities with our chosen datasets—data exploration, visual inspiration, free writing, and doodling—where visual, textual, and analytical elements inform one another. You will leave with the draft of a mini comic, and the tools and inspiration to continue developing your project.

Join us for an in-depth presentation on the New York City Jail Population Tracker — a cutting-edge, open-source dashboard that brings real-time data to life. This powerful tool monitors the city’s jail population, provides forward-looking projections, and offers crucial context on New York City’s plan to close Rikers Island. Designed as a one-stop resource, the dashboard delivers daily insights that help public officials, advocates, researchers, and the public track the city’s progress — or lack thereof — in fulfilling its commitment to closing the jails on Rikers Island.

In this session, you’ll explore:

• The Story Behind the Numbers: Background on Rikers Island, the #CloseRikers campaign, and ongoing efforts for reform and decarceration.
• Building the Dashboard: A behind-the-scenes look at how NYC’s Open Data API, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Python, and Streamlit came together to create this user-friendly, data-driven tool.
• Data in Action: An interactive demonstration of the dashboard, with insights into the current and projected state of NYC’s jail population — including breakdowns by race, gender, and mental health service needs.

Speakers include Elizabeth Johnson, Data Scientist and lead creator of the dashboard; Tao (Richie) Lin, Data Manager and dashboard co-developer, Data Collaborative for Justice; Sarita Daftary, Co-Director, Freedom Agenda; and Michael Rempel, Director, Data Collaborative for Justice.

Whether you’re a policymaker, data enthusiast, or advocate for criminal justice reform, this session offers a unique opportunity to see how open data and technology can drive transparency and change. Don’t miss this chance to learn, engage, and be part of the conversation.

➡️ Explore the Dashboard: https://nyc-jail-population-tracker.datacollaborativeforjustice.org/
➡️ Read DCJ Director Michael Rempel’s latest Op-Ed on research-backed solutions to empower officials to meet the closure deadline: https://lnkd.in/eMhAR7DV

New York City is a complex and dynamic home to over 8.6 million residents with high population density, aging building stock, and interconnected infrastructure. All these elements amplify the risk of the many hazards in the city. Due to these complexities, emergency managers and planners have struggled with how to prioritize planning for these hazards because there is no mechanism to determine if some risks should be prioritized over others and to compare risks for each hazard. The same challenge also applies to selecting mitigation investments by hazard. However, since there is limited funding, city planners need to know which projects will produce a higher return on mitigation investment.

In 2020, New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM) procured a vendor to build an Urban Risk Index (URI). This index aimed to allow users to visualize and understand risk through the geographic lens of New York City. The tool incorporated specific datasets unique to New York City, creating a more localized version of FEMA's National Risk Index (NRI). As well as an index, the tool allows the user to compare geospatial outputs and analyses for different hazards. The index aspect of the tool is directly complimented by its ability to present risks in the context of the New York City landscape. Following the completion of the contract, the contractor developed a rich repository of scripts and outputs that embellished the risk analysis aim of the original request.

In our presentation, Te Du and Ahmad Shaibani of NYCEM will deliver a demo for the public version of the Urban Risk Index tool. Then we will share the methodology of the index calculations including the open datasets incorporated and how they contributed to the overall index scores. We will also share a few technical details in making the tool with open source technologies and highlight how they made the tool more robust and maintainable for future iterations.