On March 27, as part of NYC Open Data Week, The GovLab, Brooklyn Public Library, and the Alliance for Public Interest Technology at New York University convened a “Questions Lab” to explore how open data can better reflect and respond to the needs of New Yorkers. The session was supported by a group of volunteers and collaborators, including students and faculty from NYU, some of whose reflections on the event are featured below.

At a time when cities are producing more data than ever, the challenge extends beyond access to relevance, demand, and use. Data may be available, but it is not always aligned with the questions people have, the needs they are trying to meet, or the decisions they face. Too often, there is a disconnect between the supply of data and the demand for answers, between what is published and what is needed to inform action.

Led by The GovLab’s Stefaan Verhulst in collaboration with Brooklyn Public Library’s Diana Plunkett and NYU Professor Manny Patole, the session focused on addressing a growing “question deficit”: the gap between available data and the questions needed to turn that data into meaningful insight and action.

OPENING DISCUSSION

The session began with a framing on the role of questions in shaping how data creates value. While open data initiatives have traditionally focused on publishing datasets, far less attention has been paid to how questions are identified, formulated, and prioritized. The central constraint is not the availability of data, but the absence of well-defined, actionable questions.

Verhulst positioned the Questions Lab as part of a broader effort to build a more participatory approach to question-setting, including through the 100 Questions Initiative, a process through which data-actionable questions are crowdsourced and prioritized. Rather than starting from available data, this approach begins with lived experience and translates real needs into questions that can guide data use and collection.

GROUP DISCUSSIONS

The 20 New Yorkers who participated then broke into smaller groups organized around key domains drawn from the Mayor’s platform: Affordability, Housing, Early Childhood and Education, and Labor and Small Business.

Each group followed a structured process to move from issues to data-actionable questions. Participants identified key themes, refined them into specific components, developed questions that could be addressed using data, and mapped those questions to relevant NYC Open Data and other datasets. This created a clear link between community priorities, available data, and potential pathways to action.

After deliberation, the full group reconvened and each subgroup shared the questions they identified as most important.

EMERGING QUESTIONS AND INSIGHTS

Affordability

The affordability discussion expanded to capture the full set of costs shaping life in New York City, including housing, childcare, food, transportation, healthcare, employment, and leisure. Participants framed affordability in terms of thresholds and tradeoffs, focusing on what it takes to maintain stability, participate in community life, and build toward longer-term goals. 

The distinction between surviving and thriving emerged as a central theme, alongside the cumulative burden of everyday expenses and the added costs of navigating life without shared support. Participants also highlighted challenges in accessing services, pointing to a persistent gap between service availability and discoverability. Existing programs are often difficult to find and navigate due to limited awareness and fragmented systems. This raised questions about how open data, and potentially AI tools, could improve visibility and access to services that support community connection. 

In the shareback, the group centered on three questions: How do we ensure that those born and raised in NYC can afford to remain in the city over their lifetimes? What happens to the city when people with talent and knowledge are priced out? And how can residents more easily find and access free or low-cost public programs and services?

Housing

Participants described housing as an interconnected system shaped by legal, economic, social, and environmental forces. Discussions linked tenant and landlord dynamics, zoning and regulation, redlining and segregation, financialization, and short-term rentals, alongside concerns about affordability, homeownership, and access to shelter. 

The group also emphasized neighborhood identity, public space, and community connection, as well as environmental risks such as lead exposure and air quality. These factors interact to influence stability, safety, and the ability to remain in place. Housing support, governance, and access to services were also raised as key components of the broader system. 

In the shareback, the group focused on questions of both aspiration and constraint: What does ideal housing in New York City look like, and how far is the current system from that vision? What land is available for new development, and what is the condition of existing housing stock?

Early Childhood and Education

The early childhood and education discussion focused on how resources, access, and outcomes are distributed across students and communities. Participants raised questions about where students are located relative to schools and services, the availability and quality of childcare and aftercare, and how resources such as funding, teachers, facilities, and nutrition are allocated. Issues of equity were central, including language access, disability support, and differences in travel time and safety. Participants also expressed interest in how progress is tracked and how outcomes are measured in a changing technological landscape. 

In the shareback, these themes converged around questions of distribution and accountability: How are quality, access, and cost balanced across the system? How is nutrition integrated into student outcomes? And how much funding is available, and where does it actually go?

Labor and Small Business

The labor and small business discussion surfaced a set of pressures affecting both workers and local enterprises, including healthcare, benefits, wages, regulatory conditions, and access to capital and support. Participants noted how these factors are interconnected, with changes in one area shaping outcomes in others. Concerns about cost-of-living pressures, retirement security, and aging in place underscored the importance of long-term stability, while discussions of unions and public programs raised questions about accountability and effectiveness. 

In the shareback, the group focused on questions related to transparency and responsibility: What evidence is needed to assess whether union welfare funds are being spent effectively compared to other public employee systems? What obligations do different levels of government have in providing healthcare? And how much funding is available at the local level to support public service employees aging in place?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Three themes stood out across the discussions. First, participants approached public issues as interconnected systems rather than discrete categories. Questions about affordability, housing, education, and labor consistently overlapped, reflecting how these challenges are experienced in practice, even as public data remains organized sector by sector.

Second, access and discoverability emerged as persistent challenges across topics. Participants focused on where public programs, services, and resources are located, who can access them, whether they are reaching people in practice, and how well they align with actual patterns of need.

Third, the session showed the importance of starting with lived experience. The strongest questions begin with everyday challenges and then connect to data. This highlights the need for stronger alignment between community priorities, the questions being asked, and the data systems used to answer them.

LOOKING AHEAD

The Questions Lab reinforced the importance of focusing on the questions that data is meant to answer. It also demonstrated a replicable model for connecting community insight to data-driven action: starting with lived experience, translating that into structured questions, and linking those questions to data.

The questions identified during the session point to opportunities to improve how data is collected, shared, and applied across New York City. They also highlight the growing role of open data in the age of AI. As tools make it easier to access and analyze information, the central challenge is ensuring that the right questions are being asked and that systems are equipped to respond to them.

As cities continue to invest in open data, embedding this kind of participatory approach will be critical to ensuring that data is not only available, but meaningful and actionable. Strengthening the connection between community perspectives and data systems will help ensure that data more effectively informs decisions, guides policy, and supports more inclusive public problem-solving.

REFLECTIONS

Manny Patole, NYU (Professor and Co-Organizer)

Open Data Week with The Governance Lab and Brooklyn Public Library was a meaningful reminder that engaged communities remain deeply interested in shaping how data informs public life. It was especially valuable to see students experience, in real time, how classroom readings and lessons translated directly into practice through the work led by Stefaan and GovLab. 

The event reflected many of the principles we discuss in class: that community and question science are ongoing, relational efforts. Only through human interaction, conversation, and trust can we better understand what communities want, what they need, and develop questions and data practices that produce useful public knowledge.

Claudia Duran Garcia, NYU Student Volunteer

The conversation in the “Labor and Small Business” breakout group sparked instantly. Engaging with fellow New Yorkers across generations with unique lived experiences was a highlight of the workshop. Hearing from a retired union teacher seeking data to defend healthcare benefits that were once promised underscored a vital truth: data tells us the “what” but people tell us the “why”.

This event reinforced my belief that data-driven and mission-driven decision-making must go hand in hand. I strongly resonated with the observation that we often prioritize data collection over the thoughtful formulation of the questions themselves. While formulating well-crafted questions is difficult, it is a critical step in driving meaningful change. The "Questions Lab" (Q-Lab) concept is a great initiative for researchers, activists, and decision-makers alike. I am eager to see how the Q-Lab framework fosters a more inclusive, responsive New York.

Chaitanya Kukreja, NYU Student Volunteer

Attending the Open data and Better Questions event during NYC Open Data Week was a grateful experience for me. This was the first time formally I sat in a room where real citizens/public (New Yorkers, regardless of background) discussed issues through the lens of their Lived experience. The energy in the room was welcoming, creative and genuinely collaborative. Everyone’s perspective was respected, and watching people organically choose the bigger categories(early childhood & education,housing, affordability, labor and small business) according to their interest before drilling into specific questions showed me what real community engagement looks and feels like. I am someone who values education and the conversation around childcare and education was really good. 

People raised some questions like: where are quality childcare programs? How is the budget allocated, and where does it actually go? How to find quality teachers? These were not abstract questions they came from parents and people navigating their lives and finding good childcare/education for their children. One moment that made me understand more was discussion around school surveys that parents fill, where only few parents fill it, that partial response is rarely flagged making the data skew silently. It made me question reliability, consistency and trust: why should we trust data that doesn’t capture the full picture? - of course there will not always be 100% participation but how do we ensure the data is trustful?

What also moved me was realizing how many people still don’t know where data lives or how to access it and that is not just a technical gap but it is an awareness problem too. 

This connects to something I now see more clearly through courses I take at CUSP and experiences I have had. A course that it connects to is Citizen and the City at CUSP, where we explore how communities use data, design thinking and appreciative inquiry to address urban challenges and co-creation of different community led projects. This event was that framework alive in a room. It also made me think about the AI dimension: How are education and childcare programs actually utilizing AI and how do we ensure it works meaningfully, rather than just existing or not used well? Also, I love to teach and love designing something meaningful for students that makes them grow and independent to think. This made me think about what the next generation (not just next but in fact the previous generations needed this too) truly needs: not just information delivery but development of creativity, critical thinking, and skills that prepare them for a future which we can’t predict fully.

Trust, reliability, human judgement, passion, engagement, and intuition are things AI cannot substitute and this event reminded me that good data like good education has to be built with communities not just for them. The conversation during the event was wide ranging and unstructured - but that is part of community engagement and I love it. Through human judgement I chose to highlight what I believe can bring change/impact.

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