We are conducting research to better understand the information infrastructure that supports community boards and are producing recommendations on how to make municipal information more useful! Can you give us five mins and tell us your successes and/or data needs?
For the last three months, we have documented the existing information workflows within community boards, while highlighting opportunities for improvement — particularly, accessibility of city information that supports community board operations. To date, we have interviewed most of the district managers in Manhattan about their information flows, how they analyze issues, and advance decision-making. Additionally, we have interviewed district managers about the datasets and tools they would like to see more accessible to their board members.
NOW, we are seeking public feedback from community board members. To do so, we have a survey for all community board members in New York City, and asking for two stories:
- A Data Success Story describing an instance when a committee or board member successfully used public data or tools to address an issue that came before the board
- A Data Needs Use Case describing an instance when a committee or board member was confronted with an issue for which they needed more or more readily available data to make a better-informed decision.
Each use case should only take about 5-10 minutes to complete, and while it would greatly support our work if each community board member could fill the survey out twice (submitting one Data Success Story and one Data Needs Use Case). Members can certainly submit more than one.
In the coming months, we will organize and index the data success stories into a catalog that we will share publicly and make readily available to all community boards. YOUR stories will help us 1) to identify data sets that we should request for the city to produce, 2) to develop training for community boards regarding how to find and pull apart relevant data, and 3) to produce tools that display this information in intuitive ways.
The survey will remain open until June 30; it can be accessed here.
Print versions of the survey are also available for download below and can be emailed to lindsay@beta.nyc.