Open Data and Better Questions: Engaging New Yorkers to Develop Questions that Matter in the Age of AI

As one of the largest open data providers in the world—with data accessed more than 2.6 million times and downloaded from a total of more than 900,000 times—NYC Open Data has critical information about how New Yorkers live. But a question remains: For what end? What questions do we want these systems to answer? What problems do we want to solve?

On Friday, March 27th from 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM at Brooklyn Central Library, The GovLab, the Brooklyn Public Library and Alliance for Public Interest Technology at New York University will be hosting a special “Questions Lab” as part of New York City Open Data Week 2026. In it, we will give New Yorkers the opportunity to formulate good, data-driven questions about the issues they care about and to meaningfully connect those questions to specific datasets in NYC Open Data or other, non-traditional repositories. It will include a brief presentation followed by small group discussion on the questions that New Yorkers care about:
– 2:00 – 2:20 PM: Setting the Scene: Stefaan Verhulst (Co-Founder, The GovLab), Diana Plunkett (Director of Data Analytics, Brooklyn Public Library), and Manny Patole (Senior Fellow, Alliance for Public Interest Technology) will explain the work that Brooklyn Library and The GovLab are doing to help residents not only understand data that describes them but to engage with it meaningfully to solve problems they care about.
– 2:20 – 2:50: Topic Mapping and Question Definition: Attendees will be broken into small groups and taught how to define data-driven questions. Each group will focus on a different domain prioritized by the New York Mayor’s Office.
– 2:50 – 3:30: Group Voting on Questions and Debrief: Each group will present their questions. Referencing NYC Open Data and other datasets, the collective group will identify what data might exist in New York to answer these questions. They will then vote on which questions they consider the highest priority based on demand, actionability, and the larger regulatory context.

The end result of this work will be a prioritized mapping of the questions that matter for New Yorkers. This event is open to any New York resident interested in data and how it can be used to set a policy agenda. Participants will leave the event with a practical methodology for developing well-crafted, data-driven questions and the work they produce will inform new open data research. Register here.