albany's open data program

The City of Albany maintains an Open Data portal known as openAlbany for the distribution of City-owned and -originated data.  

From the home page: “openAlbany supports government transparency, openness and innovative uses of municipal data that can help improve the lives of Albany residents, visitors and businesses.”

As a user of the City’s Open Data we have found some shortcomings with the data on the portal and its currency/vintage and organization.  We want to explain what we’ve found and make some recommendations on openAlbany’s direction.  

 openAlbany uses an open data management software system from Socrata that is now owned by Tyler Technologies.  In 2017 the City of Albany spent $33,349 on “Open Data Cloud” from Socrata, Inc.  In 2018 the City of Albany spent approximately $45 thousand with Tyler Technologies and we are making an assumption that some portion of this spending was for the open data technology.  We will look at more recent vendor spending with Tyler Technologies and Socrata when we FOIA the appropriate vendor data.  The important point is that the City is spending a material amount of money on the underlying open data distribution technology.

On the Open Data site home page there are four featured datasets:

1. Property Tax Assessment - “Data on the tax assessment of approximately 31,000 properties”.  Last updated August 2014
2. City Employee Earnings - “Data of earning information for City employees”.  Last updated May 2016 
3. 90 Day Crime Data Map - “Map of crime statistics in the City of Albany”.  Last updated April 2020
4. Outstanding Parking Citations - “Data of unpaid parking violations” - Last updated March 2020

This is a bit of a leading indicator that openAlbany’s vintage or currency is not up-to-date.

There are 53 datasets available on openAlbany.  We can examine the last updated date by year:

• 2024-25 - 10 datasets, all of which are managed and updated by the Albany Police Department (APD)
• 2022 - 16 datasets, all of which are managed and updated by the Albany Police Department
• 2020-21 - 13 datasets, primarily APD data with some from other City sources
• 2014-2019 - 14 datasets 

A reasonable summary statement is that Albany has paid a significant amount of money for the openAlbany infrastructure; with the exception of data managed by the Albany Police Department the content that is available suggests that there is no or low attention to open data distribution

 We can examine our neighbors and peer cities to see what they are doing with respect to open data.

• Troy, Saratoga Springs and Clifton Park do not have open data portals
• Schenectady, NY has an open data site that was last updated in 2021 
• Syracuse, NY as an open data site with 128 datasets that appears to be mostly updated
• Rochester, NY has an open data site with over 200 datasets that appears to be very current
• Some cities don’t have open data portals however they are covered by county data portals, e.g. Poughkeepsie does not have its own portal but is covered by the Dutchess County NY open data portal

The takeaway is that it is an effort to envision, build and maintain an open data site; best of intentions sometimes take a back seat and open data sites can become stale.

 We’ve worked with open data for various uses and have seen a number of excellent open data websites.  One that we like as an exemplar is Louisville Kentucky’s open data website.  Yes, Louisville is 6x the size of Albany in population, however the things that they are doing with open data are models that we can use.  

What do we like about Louisville’s open data site?

• They have 559 open datasets for 20 different categories (Parking, Health, Crime, Foreclosure)
• Their data is kept up-to-date
• They put out an annual report that discusses user engagement, new datasets that have been added, improvements to citizen interaction with the data, and more
• They have added topical content as a bolt-on to the open data site, including “The Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness (LMPHW) launched a new Health Equity Data Dashboard in 2024 providing a data snapshot of the city's overall health.”

 Given what openAlbany is and isn’t right now, and what we can see that other cities are doing with their open data sites, what should Albany be doing?  We would suggest this:

1. openAlbany is a leadership priority.  The mayor, department leaders and operational leaders must think of the distribution of open data as a part of the City’s job
2. Publish an annual open data report which includes information on the current state, expansion and utilization of the open data site AND the development and evolution of open data processes 
3. Create and/or gather any utilization metrics such as which datasets are being downloaded and viewed
4. Create departmental and operational processes that specifically describe when and how often open data is created, updated, published, and documented.  
5. Create guidelines that provide guidance on what datasets should be shared and when.  For example, these guidelines would describe how to handle personally identifiable information, when to take frequently FOIA-ed datasets and move them online, and how frequently datasets should be updated.
6. Create a feedback mechanism for citizens to request additional datasets and to receive notification of dataset availability and usefulness

 openAlbany’s vision statement is good and describes what the value of openAlbany could be:

“openAlbany supports government transparency, openness and innovative uses of municipal data that can help improve the lives of Albany residents, visitors and businesses.”

There is fundamental change and leadership attention that is required to make this happen.  We are providing our perspective as a user of Albany’s open data.  Are you an openAlbany user or potential user? If you’re a citizen, an academic, a student, a nonprofits, etc we want to hear you weigh in on what changes to Albany’s data availability would assist you and your mission.

Questions or comments?  email us at AlbanyDataStories@gmail.com