NYC School of Data 2025

Tree canopy covers over a fifth of the land area in New York City, offering a wide variety of benefits to people and biodiversity while supporting resilience in the face of a changing climate. The Nature Conservancy, with collaboration and review by NYC Parks, recently released data on tree canopy in NYC as of 2021 – an update to datasets released by the City for 2010 and 2017. Come learn about the data, some initial findings about tree canopy in NYC and how it is changing, and how you can start working with the data yourself in open source software (QGIS) from Mike Treglia (Lead Scientist of the NY Cities Program at The Nature Conservancy) and Uma Bhandaram (Deputy Chief of Environment & Planning at NYC Parks). If you are interested in trees in NYC or the environment more broadly, urban planning, or spatial data and GIS, this session might be for you!

If you're new to digital security, 2025 is your year! (And if you're a seasoned practitioner, 2025 is... also your year.)

The past 2.25 months have, if nothing else, showcased the vulnerability of public data as a stark contrast to the value of our personal data. After DECADES of shifting to online services, sometimes exclusively, there's a lot of personally identifiable information out there that it would be prudent to safeguard.

This session will be presented by Davis Erin Anderson, Senior Digital Security Trainer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. Since around 2016, Davis has been training journalists, librarians, and anyone else who will listen on how to enhance their privacy and security online. Her favorite topics are credential security, avoiding online scams, and how to use encryption everywhere possible.

Join this session to talk shop about various vulnerabilities and threats, from phishing scams to government surveillance, and what we might do about them. We each have the power to keep our data, ourselves, and one another safe this year and into the future.

Imagine a publicly accessible lab space where we can come together to showcase projects aimed at unlocking the power of Open Data and digital tools to empower communities. We are committed to creating such a venue in NYC.

Through a fun and interactive "visioning game," participants will collaborate to design a blueprint for a NYC Public Interest Technology Lab. We will be using an IRL game format and arts and crafts to engage participants. Our goal is to emerge from this workshop with a bold, shared vision of a collaborative hub that bridges sectors and communities: promoting digital equity, tech transparency, and community empowerment. The outcomes of this workshop will help guide our planning for the NYC PIT Pop-Up that we are going to be creating in Fall 2025 that will feature our collective work.

In this workshop, you’ll learn what public interest technology is and how it can be understood as part of community-driven data solutions. Working together in a gamified format, teams will map the lab’s potential priorities, generate focus areas, and identify resources to make the biggest impact. Using collaborative storytelling and creative exercises, we’ll synthesize your ideas into actionable next steps. Participants will have the opportunity to win prizes. Join us to help shape the future of public interest technology in NYC and make this vision a reality!

Anyone attending School of Data/Open Data week who are engaged in projects/orgs that promote digital equity, public access to data science, performance & protest art, public interest technologists, civic technologists, data practitioners and early career technologists are encouraged to attend. Student, community, academic and non-profit leaders welcome.