Squirrel Census, HealthData Scavenger Hunts, and Labby Hour
The NYC Open Data week is here. New York City has been very transparent with their data, making public everything from 311 calls to building permits. And New York is making sure everyone has the tools to build their own local awesome data project. Here’s the schedule for open data week. Some events are already sold out.
There is a lot of data available to parse through from New York City’s open data portal. Here you have the wealth of information about the public administration of all things New York.
Navigating the portal is easy. You have access to the most popular datasets. Pick a dataset and you can jump straight to visualizations with the “create a visualization” tool above the data preview. You can also download the data to plot.ly, carto, excel bi for custom visualizations, although beware of data caps, the files can be huge. You can also download the full dataset onto your computer as a csv for your own data manipulation.
Popular events include the Squirrel Census. Sunday March 1. New Yorkers track and map the squirrels of Central Park, what trees they favor, track number and varieties. Some of the squirrels get precious little names like “Bitey”, and “Franklin.” There is also a Scavenger Hunt on Wednesday March 4 using DATA2GOHEALTH’s New York City’s health data map.
Workshops run the gamut of general 101 type courses on how to get data to specific minutiae of taxi permitting process. Bring a laptop and headphones because you’ll be coding and sitting in on experienced data analysts explain their trade. There are several Hackathon events, from visualizations to pay parity. There are events for all skills and ages of New Yorkers.
And of course for people who are looking to network there are Happy Hour events in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Mayor’s office is represented in many of the events but you can also talk to healthcare, data science, political professionals. New Yorkers know how to throw a data party.
