Contact

The Upstate Data Project welcomes two kinds of conversations. If you have data or technology skills and want to help your community, we want to hear from you. If you are a government official looking to connect with outside innovators, we can help point you toward people and resources.

Use the form below to start a conversation.

Local governments across Upstate New York are sitting on a wealth of information about their communities, from traffic patterns and public health indicators to demographic trends and service requests. The Upstate Data Project is a collaborative archive that helps city and county teams turn that raw information into something usable. By collecting examples, case studies, and practical guides in one place, the project makes it easier for municipal staff to learn from peers in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, and Schenectady rather than starting from scratch each time a new question arises.

Technology choices for smaller and mid-sized governments often come with their own set of tradeoffs, and the project pays close attention to that reality. Rather than chasing the latest tools, the archive highlights approaches that are realistic to maintain with limited staff and budgets, from open-source dashboards to straightforward data publishing workflows. Public-facing portals, searchable datasets, and clear documentation are recurring themes, along with ways to make content easier for citizens to find and understand. The goal is steady, practical improvement that compounds over time.

Innovation in the public sector rarely happens in isolation, and conversation is a large part of the work. The Upstate Data Project invites technologists, researchers, and curious residents who want to lend their skills, as well as officials looking for outside perspectives on stubborn operational challenges. Sharing lessons between cities, learning from successful programs in other regions, and building a network of practitioners across Upstate New York all help local governments serve their populations more efficiently and with greater transparency.