New York State Office of Information Technology Services VIA EMAIL
Empire State Plaza
Albany, NY 12220-0062
October 26, 2020
Dear Jeremy M. Goldberg,
Our organizations thank the Office of Information Technology Services for publishing its Open NY Quarterly Reports. These updates are essential for helping New Yorkers see steps the state is taking for greater transparency.
New York’s Open Data Portal was launched in 2013, established by Governor Cuomo’s Executive Order 95. Since then, the ITS office has released troves of data to the public and provided quarterly updates on open data developments. The October 2020 report included:
- A list of new documents from Open NY
- Metadata such as the number of dataset refreshes processed, number of records available, and number of state agencies and authorities publishing data
- Highlights of datasets available, including HVAC Market Share by Efficiency and Capacity
Especially in times of crisis, open data allows the public to see how state government operates and assess what can be done to make it better. The state’s COVID-19 data portal has allowed New Yorkers to view daily updates on New York’s progress in containing the virus. We hope that the state will take further steps and make this data downloadable, sortable and machine-readable, as we and six other groups requested in a letter to the Governor in April 2020. It would also be useful to include the contact info of the author of the Open NY quarterly report.
We applaud the ITS office for their transparency efforts and consistent reports on progress made to date.
Sincerely,
John Kaehny
Executive Director
Reinvent Albany
Noel Hidalgo
Executive Director
BetaNYC
Betsy Gotbaum
Executive Director
Citizens Union
Susan Lerner
Executive Director
Common Cause New York
Laura Ladd Bierman
Executive Director
League of Women Voters New York State
Blair Horner
Executive Director
NYPIRG