The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications plans to publish more than double the amount of datasets this year than it published to the portal last year, new Commissioner Anne Roest wrote last week in an annual report mandated by the city's open data law, with 135 datasets scheduled to be released this year, and almost 100 more to come in 2015.

But what what matters more to New York City open data advocates than the absolute number of the datasets is their quality and values: creating a transparent process of releasing the data, making the data machine-readable and prioritizing release of data sets in high demand. As preparations are underway for City Council hearings on the law, New York City's open data progress and challenges are both a model and reflective of open data efforts across the country.

"I think New York City is doing an amazing job with Open Data. I think that the city is not taking nearly enough credit for a lot of the datasets involved with the Mayor's Management report," said City Council member Ben Kallos, chair of the Government Operations Committee, referring to datasets related to a mandated annual public report card of city services. "It may appear like it's only one dataset here and there but the underlying data is so rich and contains so many hundreds of other datasets that the administration is releasing so much more information than anyone expected by this point."