Community Board Data Success Stories and Use Cases

Can you give us five mins and tell us your successes and/or data needs?

To better serve community board technology and data needs, we are collecting feedback from community board members and district office staff about how they are currently using data resources to advance their decision-making and work. We would also like to collect feedback about issues that come before committees and offices that have been difficult to address because of a lack of relevant public information.

We are asking community board members and district office staff to submit:

1. A Data Success Story describing an instance when an office, committee, or board member successfully used public data or tools to address an issue that came before the board
2. A Data Needs Use Case describing an instance when an office, 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. It would greatly support our work if each community board member and district staff member could submit one Data Success Story and one Data Needs Use Case. However, we would be happy to accept whatever you have time to complete, and members can certainly submit more than one.

Then, we will compile and index success stories into a catalog that we will share publicly and make readily available to all community boards. The data use cases will help our team 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.


About this project:
BetaNYC is a community based organization dedicated to improving lives in New York through civic design, technology, and data. We are currently working in partnership with Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer, the Mayor's Office of Data Analytics, and City University of New York's Service Corps program to address Manhattan Community Boards' technology, data, and literacy needs. To date, the program has developed BoardStat, a NYC 311 dashboard built with Community Boards for Community Boards, the City's first freely available - Creative Commonsed open data curriculum, conducted a detailed technology census of District Offices, and is working with DOITT to help modernize Community Board websites.