E&V Background

In December 2015, the New York City Council passed Intro No. 916-A, which required an agency designated by the Mayor to conduct a series of examinations of select City agencies’ data assets to verify their compliance with the Open Data Law. In January 2016, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed Int. No. 916-A into Local Law 8 of 2016 (Appendix A) and appointed the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA) to oversee the process. MODA then prepared an Examination and Verification (E&V) plan that was approved by the Commissioner of the Department of Investigation.

In December 2016, MODA submitted the results of the first E&V for the Department of Sanitation (DSNY), Department of Correction (DOC), and Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). In 2017, MODA submitted examinations of the Department of Buildings, Fire Department (FDNY), and the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). These results can be found in the “Reports” section of the Open Data website.

The E&V process is designed to improve citywide compliance with the Open Data Law by creating a more systematic way to locate datasets that may have been excluded in agencies’ self-reported open data compliance plans. Agency Open Data Coordinators (ODCs), who serve as liaisons to MODA and DoITT and coordinate data publishing in their agencies, were responsible for fulfilling the E&V requirements on behalf of their agencies.

Each year, MODA has gathered feedback from ODCs at the surveyed agencies, City Council, and the public open data community to improve the E&V process with each cycle. This year’s cycle featured the following components.

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