WeGov Team

New York City has 1,003,629 students in its public school system. These students go to 2,190 schools. 1,907 of these schools are managed by the Department of Education and 283 are run by charter schools. There are 13,054 capital projects planned for these schools by the School Construction Authority with a projected cost of $15.9 billion. That’s well over $15,000 of capital projects per student.

These numbers are all calculated from NYC’s Open Data. They’re a small part of Databook’s new Schools section, which combines 12 NYC open datasets from Department of Education, School Construction Authority and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to create two new Databook experiences: school profiles and school districts.

School profiles offer enrollment, attendance, demographic, capacity, health violation and construction project information for each of NYC’s over 2,000 K-12 public and charter schools. Our profiles also display 6 unique ID numbers for each school related to different government agencies: DBN (Department of Education), Building Code (School Construction Authority), BBL (Department of Buildings), BEDS ID (NY State Education Department), Facility Name (Department of City Planning) and Campus Name (NYPD). You can use these IDs to find more information about a school from these various agencies.

Each school profile links out the schools information on DOE’s official School Profiles at schools.nyc.gov and to the school’s profile on TheCity’s School Mental Health Project. They also link out to our new school district profiles in the Databook’s District tool.

The School District Profile shows all the schools in a district, the SCA’s capital projects in that district as well as past and future enrollment in the district by grade. We also offer a few district related stats such as the number of schools, number of students, number of capital projects, project budgets and project cost per student in each district.

We hope you find these new features useful and, as always, please don’t hesitate to contact us with feedback, ideas and questions.

Databook has always been two projects in one.

The first project is our data pipeline that collects, normalizes and republishes normalized NYC Open Data so that other people can use it.

The second is to build a general purpose app that makes this information understandable and useful for the public.

In the beginning of the project, we used CartoDB’s API platform to publish the data that comes out of our pipeline. It was easy to deploy, fast and efficient, but it didn’t allow us to control how we share API access with the public. So, we switched to a custom solution that uses the open source FastAPI framework and PostgreSQL.

You can find our new API, along with Swagger docs, at databook-api.wegov.nyc.

The code for our API is posted on Github.

We want to help people use our normalized data! If you’re interested in using another of the data used in Databook or want to use our data directly from our API, please let us know.

New York City’s “City Record” is the official “journal” where city agencies publish news and event information. This info includes public hearings, procurement announcements, contract awards, rule changes, auctions, personnel changes and more.

We’ve used the city’s open data version, which is updated daily, to integrate The City Record’s contents into the WeGov data system, enabling us to integrate it with the 25+ data sets we already display on Agency Profiles.

Now you can view all of an agencies CIty Record news and events on that agency’s profile. You can also subscribe to that information using the RSS and ICS/iCal feeds we provide for each agency.

We also built a front end for the City Record with a few new features. You can now see how many new items are in each of the City Record’s sections, get RSS and iCAL feeds of all items, and even browse detailed information from auctions of city property.

We hope you enjoy this update and please let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve any of our products.

New York City government has a workforce over 300,000 people, and that workforce is structured by a system of “Civil Service Titles”. These titles define the job roles and salary of every city employee as well as the skills people need to earn that title.

This month we launched a new section called Titles where you can search and browse Civil Service Titles, view their profiles with information about their salaries and unions, and see how that title connects to other important NYC Open Datasets that describe Positions, Job Opening and Civil Lists.

• Positions shows the number of people an agency is expected to have with a certain title (ex. the NYPD has positions for 25 Accountants.)
• Job Openings: these are open positions associate with a civil service title (ex. the city has 13 job openings for Accountants.)
• Civil List: these are the individuals who work for city agencies with a specific civil service title (ex. see the first initial and last name, and salaries of the 26 accountants employed by the NYPD in 2019.)

We also integrated these datasets into the People section of Agency Profiles and added a two more datasets about agency headcounts and demographics.

We’ve researched how to get more details each civil service titles such as their requirements and exam schedules but found that information hard to extract as it is in the links from this PDF of civil service exam schedules.

If you know of more or better data sources, or have ideas or proposals for what we should do next, please let us know via our community participation platform or simply send us a message.

We look forward to collaborating with you!