NYC Open Data and the 2012 Open Data Law

🤖 AI-generated summary · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-26

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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A 2012 law made publishing a duty and barred any licence on the data. Keeping it current is a staffing question: the city told the Council 47% of agency datasets miss their update standards.

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byNYC Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), Office of Data Analytics

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 17 more in New York City · 📊 Open data guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects

A 2012 law, Local Law 11, obliges every New York City agency to name an open-data coordinator, file an annual compliance plan, and publish its public datasets on one portal by the end of 2018. The portal carried roughly 3,000 datasets from more than 90 agencies in 2024. The statute bars registration and licence requirements, so the portal imposes no licence, only a disclaimer and a request to cite source and version. The deadline did not close the job: the watchdog Reinvent Albany counted 435 datasets flagged for automation but not automated in 2024, and the city told the Council that 47% of agency datasets miss their update standards.

Live 📅 since 2012

📊 Impact

Roughly 3,000 datasets from more than 90 city agencies (2024). 801,291 portal users and 2,048 new community-made charts, maps and filtered views in FY2024 (July 2023-June 2024), 25,968 such assets cumulatively. 47% of agency-submitted datasets did not meet on-time update standards (city figure reported to the Council, February 2024).

🎓 Lesson

A statutory duty gets data published; keeping it current is a staffing question, and that is where the mandate leaks.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government Citizen participation

Sources

↗ NYC Open Data — Laws and ReportsCity's own summary of Local Law 11 of 2012: all public data on a single web portal by December 31, 2018; lists the amendments, including Local Law 251 of 2017 extending the mandate to datasets identified after 2018 and requiring each agency to designate an Open Data Coordinator.

↗ NYC Open Data Technical Standards Manual — City PoliciesSupports the compliance machinery: 'Each Agency must designate one of its employees as the Agency's Open Data Coordinator (ODC)'; annual plan updates due 'on or before July 15 of each year'; agencies missing the 2018 date must 'clearly state the reasons why'.

↗ NYC Open Data Technical Standards Manual — Public PoliciesThe licence question, sentence-level: 'Local Law 11 of 2012, specifically 23-502 d, requires that data sets must be available without registration requirement, license requirement, or usage restrictions, except as provided below.' Same page carries the warranty disclaimer and the provision that re-publishers may be required to 'explicitly identify the source, version, and modifications made'.

↗ NYC Open Data FAQPlain-language confirmation that no licence is imposed: 'Open Data belongs to all New Yorkers. There are no restrictions on the use of Open Data.'

↗ Office of Data Analytics — Dataset Cleanup: Consolidating the Open Data InventorySource of the scale figure: 'there are approximately 3,000 datasets from more than 90 different City agencies' (2024); also documents consolidating 524 separate datasets into 34.

Show 7 more sourcesShow fewer

↗ NYC Open Data 2024 Progress Report — Open Data by the NumbersUsage figures for FY2024 (July 1, 2023 — June 30, 2024): 801,291 global users, 2,048 community-made assets created in the year, 25,968 cumulative; top datasets include 311 Service Requests and Open Parking and Camera Violations.

↗ NYC Council Committee on Technology — open data oversight hearingCouncil's record of the February 27, 2024 oversight hearing: the Office of Data Analytics reported that '47% of agency-submitted datasets do not meet on-time standards', with a team of 5.5 staff. Origin of the 47% figure is the operator, reported to the Council.

↗ Reinvent Albany — Testimony: NYC Open Data Blemished by Big BacklogIndependent watchdog analysis, February 2024: '435 datasets waiting to be automated'; automating the 437 already done took twelve years; '22% of datasets have been removed from open data plans since 2018'. Reinvent Albany helped draft the 2012 law.

↗ NYC Open Data 2025 Progress ReportCurrency check: the programme and its annual statutory reporting were still running in 2025 under the Office of Technology and Innovation.

↗ Santi et al., Quantifying the benefits of vehicle pooling with shareability networks, PNAS (2014)Documented downstream research reuse of NYC taxi trip records: 150 million trips analysed. Provenance caveat — the 2011 records used here came from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, not from a portal download.

↗ Chris Whong — FOILing NYC's Taxi Trip DataEstablishes that the 2013 trip records (~170 million trips, fields including 'medallion' and 'hack license') were released under a Freedom of Information Law request, not published through the Open Data portal. Basis for keeping the re-identification episode out of the snippet.

↗ Vijay Pandurangan — On Taxis and RainbowsThe cautionary case: MD5-hashed medallion and hack-licence numbers were reversed with a rainbow table in about an hour, because the input space was tiny and known. TLC dropped both columns from later trip-record releases.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 NYC311 Service Requests & Open Data · New York City The 2012 law made publication a duty; 311 had already been shipping every request, opened and closed, since 2010. 🇺🇸 Citi Bike Docked Bike Share & Open Trip Data · New York City The law bars anyone imposing a licence on city data — but not the contractor's: Citi Bike's trip files forbid redistribution. 🇮🇩 Jakarta Open Data Portal & Satu Data Jakarta · Jakarta Two statutes, no deed: Jakarta calls its data public domain under a 2008 law, New York's 2012 law forbids licences and offers none.

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📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “NYC Open Data and the 2012 Open Data Law” — New York City, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/nyc-open-data/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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