NYC Open Data Week 2025 was one for the books!
This March, the Open Data Team at the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), BetaNYC, and Data Through Design came together for a record-breaking ninth annual NYC Open Data Week festival.
During the week, communities across the city united to demystify open data, champion digital equity, and harness the power of Open Data to drive positive change. We’re still basking in the glow!
Every choice we make furthers the universe in a direction…we shepherd the future through care, acknowledgement, and responsibility.
Jazzy Smith, Chief of Staff, BetaNYC
The real story of the year goes beyond numbers. It lives in the spark of curiosity of first-time open data learners, the hum of conversations between strangers turned collaborators, or the sheer energy pulsating through a packed classroom as our neighbors mapped out visions for their communities.
This year felt different. It wasn’t just a festival, but a movement. Data enthusiasts discovered new tools and insights, community members transformed information into action, and decision-makers saw firsthand how transparency fuels trust. We didn’t just break records—we built connections, empowered voices, and set the stage for an even more equitable data future.
Throughout the festival, 7,748 registrants attended 113 events and sessions, including 37 conference sessions at BetaNYC’s annual NYC School of Data. The week’s programming spanned the five boroughs and online spaces, offering 59 virtual events, 9 in-person events, and 8 hybrid sessions that brought together NYC’s vibrant public interest tech community. Each day began with a friendly Morning Coffee session, offering attendees and organizers a chance to connect before diving into the day’s events.
162 organizers and 53 organizations powered this year’s program, ranging from deep-dive workshops on climate data to community walks, visioning sessions, and interactive game-ifying of squirrel census data. We continued the celebrations at a high-energy School of Data 2025, where a record 564 attendees joined 91 organizers for a day of programs surrounding policies and practices regarding open data, public interest technology, gov tech, and service design. This year, OpenStreetMap, climate data, linguistic diversity, congestion pricing, and data literacy drew the highest attendance and had everyone buzzing!
NYC School of Data 2025 Stats
| Total # of conference sessions | 37 |
| Total # of Organizers and Organizations | 91 |
| Total # of participants | 564 |
| Total # of volunteers | 65 |
Based on feedback from last year’s survey, our attendees informed us that they wanted more content focused on climate open data, hands-on coding with data use, and continued opportunities to network. We heard, and we delivered! This year’s lineup reflected your interests, with a full slate of sessions designed to dive deeper, get more practical, and foster even more connections.
We’d love to hear from you if you attended any events during Open Data Week 2025! Please take a few minutes to fill out this year’s survey and help us shape next year’s festival.
Today, it’s more important than ever to be a person who can really interrogate and understand what government is doing and hold us accountable…we’re so fortunate in New York City to have the Open Data Law, but we’re even more fortunate to have this community that cares about it, and that will defend it, and that will hold us all to the highest standards in delivering open data to you.
Martha Norrick, Chief Analytics Officer, City of New York
Proof That People Power Works
A huge thank you to the 215 speakers and organizations who brought this year’s program to life. This year’s roster featured a dynamic mix of educators, community leaders, librarians, designers, researchers, analysts, public servants, and first-time speakers who shared fresh perspectives and bold ideas. We’re so proud of what they accomplished— congratulations!
We’re deeply grateful to the 65 incredible volunteers who showed up on a beautiful, sun-soaked day (80 degrees no less!) to lend their time and energy to BetaNYC’s team at School of Data. Our conference runs primarily on the power of volunteers, and their enthusiasm, generosity, and production support made the day run seamlessly— the conference wouldn’t have been the same without them!
A heartfelt shoutout to Joly MacFie and ISOC LIVE for livestreaming the mainstage School of Data sessions and ensuring Open Data Week events were captured for future viewing. The videos are in the editing cue and will be posted on the Open Data Week YouTube channel and BetaNYC YouTube channel (School of Data), where you’ll be able to view the 80 recorded sessions and relive the magic.
A special thank you to the following festival partners and School of Data sponsors. Their support made this week possible!
- Reinvent Albany
- Esri
- NYC Office of Technology and Innovation’s Office of Data Analytics (ODA)
- Data Through Design
- CUNY School of Law
- ISOC LIVE
CUNY School of Law graciously opened its doors at its Long Island City campus for the third year in a row to host School of Data. Within nine classrooms and the main stage auditorium, 564 participants (the most ever!) convened for a day of learning, networking, and community-building.
Expanding Access and Inclusion on the Main Stage
This year, with support from New York State’s ConnectAll program, we were able to provide American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation for all sessions delivered on the main stage at School of Data. Four interpreters from SignNexus joined us to help make the conference a more inclusive experience – one of the interpreters, Brandon Kazen-Maddox, was featured in a New York Times Article about how they spend their Sundays!
Each and every one of you has the ability to change things, even when the deck is stacked against us. And it’s a little stacked right now, y’all…
Government can effect a change, but it’s actually everyday people who have the power to change every single system that we live under. And when we work together, when we create communities like these, when we organize from the bottom up, that’s when we see our legislative representatives being responsive, and that’s when we see the needle start to move.Kristen Gonzalez, New York State Senator
From Flood Maps to Squirrel Games: Inside the 2025 Lineup
This year, we had the most responses to our call for community proposals EVER! 199 people submitted their event ideas for Open Data Week and School of Data. From there, we shaped a dynamic lineup of 113 events covering a range of topics. Here are just a few standout moments…
Virtual Events
OpenStreetMap as your personal GIS platform
Led by Quincy Morgan of OpenStreetMap and BetaNYC’s very own Jazzy Smith, this workshop covered OSM basics and workflows, as well as examined how the Mapping for Equity project is connecting New Yorkers to their data.
Risk Analysis of NYC Street Flooding
Four students from UConn’s Spring 2025 Introduction to Data Science course took the spotlight to share their project on flood risk factors in NYC using NYC 311 service request data to reveal patterns in flood-prone areas and how they built a predictive model to help better understand and anticipate future risks.
Decoding NYC’s Linguistic Diversity
This workshop brought together experts from City Planning, the Department for the Aging, and the Endangered Language Alliance to show how targeted data collection can spotlight the unique needs of different linguistic communities.
NYC Agency Maps, Tools, & Geospatial Data for 2025
Leaders from the NYC Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation, NYC Emergency Management, and NYC Department of City Planning came together to talk about how they use geospatial data and what initiatives are on the horizon.
In Person Events
Waterfront Data: Bridging Science & Community on Randall’s Island
Randall’s Island Park Alliance and New York Sea Grant hosted a discussion on environmental data sharing, highlighting community-driven monitoring projects and tools, and then led a guided tour of the Little Hell Gate Salt Marsh with a microplastic sampling demo.
NYC Trash Can Data Driven Walk of the Lower East Side
Researchers from Baruch College and NYU led a group of curious urbanists on an interactive walk through the Lower East Side, learning how data like trash can locations and tree health reveal community needs.
Open Data Lightning Talk Showcase
The Open Data Team at OTI held a lightning talk at their offices in Downtown Brooklyn! The presentations featured insights on child mental health, urban resiliency, public trash can accessibility, .nyc domain usage, and film location soundscapes.
Hybrid Events
The Nutty Arcade: Gamifying Squirrel Census Data
Kiley Matschke, Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at Barnard College, hosted a playful hybrid workshop that used game design principles to creatively visualize NYC’s squirrel census data.
Team Powered Events
Corpus: Bodies of Data
Data Through Design returned with their annual thematic exhibition, captivating us with artwork that brought NYC Open Data to life. This year’s theme, Corpus: Bodies of Data, explored the ways data intersects with physical, social, and political bodies—inviting us to consider how data shapes, represents, and sometimes distorts our understanding of the world around us.
Discovering NYC Open Data
Open Data Ambassadors introduced over 600 people to NYC Open Data through daily introductory classes. Chief Analytics Officer Martha Norrick even led a special class at Cornell Tech, guiding enthusiasts on exploring datasets to answer real-world questions about city services and neighborhoods!
BetaNYC’s Civic Innovation Lab Events
Our Civic Innovation Lab debuted and dazzled us with the NYC Urban Heat Portal! The map provides layers of detailed data on how to tackle extreme heat. They also teamed up with NYSCI to preview a multimodal urban planning simulation that premiered at CityWorks, the newest NYCSCI exhibition!
BetaNYC’s Fellowship Events
Our Fellowship team launched the Mapping for Equity toolkit, leaving us spellbound with their data collection efforts! They also participated in an insightful panel on biodiversity at School of Data.
NYC School of Data Sessions
Where Does NYC Garbage Go? Now it is possible to know!
This talk used newly released NYC Open Data sets to comprehensively map the flow of garbage from local districts to transfer stations to final disposal sites, sharing a data-driven view of the city’s waste system and advocating for a vision of NYC’s zero-waste future as one in which materials are kept local to the extent possible, and risks are not exported to other communities.
In Code We Trust: Volunteering and Careers in Government & Public Interest Technology
BetaNYC’s Noel Hidalgo moderated a panel discussion on the ever-evolving public interest technology landscape as federal digital service teams decline and state and local governments take on greater responsibility.
Stay in Touch – We Want to See You There Next Time
We’re excited for Open Data Week 2026 and can’t wait to see your submissions this Fall for next year’s festival!
In the meantime, BetaNYC is organizing CityCamp NYC, a late-summer unconference focusing on democracy, civil society, neighbors, government operations, and the intersection between them all. Express your interest and learn more about CityCamp by filling out this form!
We’re all here in this room because we all want to improve some corner of this city, and one part of our path forward is open data. And we believe you don’t just walk away — you level up, with new connections and perspectives. You discover other people’s struggles, insights, and build solidarity…to us, solidarity is a key ingredient in driving change and pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve for all New Yorkers.
Noel Hidalgo, Executive Director, BetaNYC
Here’s how you can stay in touch with the NYC Open Data community:
Sign up for announcements from Open Data Week throughout the year, including our call for proposals in the Fall, 2026 festival dates, quarterly Open Data Week meetups, and NYC Open Data’s annual report!
View event recordings and information about next year’s festival at open-data.nyc.
Follow us on social media!
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