My intern experience on the ACLU data infrastructure team
Since high school, I have deeply admired the work of the ACLU and have always dreamed about one day being able to contribute my energies and skillset to the important mission of preserving the rights of every individual in this country. I had always thought that I would have to wait until I entered law school to become an intern at the organization, but as I began to explore my interests in technology and data science over the past few years, I realized that there’s a really cool space at the intersection of technology and social good. At the same time, in September of last year, I saw that there was a section for technology and analytics internships on the ACLU’s internships page. While blank at the time, I came back every few weeks on the off chance that any analytics or technology internships had been posted, and in the Spring, there were! The rest, as they (don’t) say, was my internship.
I am so lucky to have been a part of the data infrastructure team over the past incredible, ten weeks, and in particular, I have been so lucky to have the best teammates and mentors I could ask for: shoutout to Tom, Maria, and Jacob, I have learned so much from you and have had so much fun being on the team! Furthermore, I was able to explore a wide variety of projects, improving my skills and learning about the ACLU along the way.
My first project was to figure out how to improve our usage of Looker, a data visualization and business intelligence software. After first assessing the recommendations that had been given to us in the past by the Looker team and consulting my infralytics teammates for their insights, I was able to come up with a plan for how I wanted to proceed in my analysis of the current usage of Looker, how to prioritize different issues, and ultimately, a set of recommendations for how the ACLU could improve. This project was really fun as I was able to conduct user interviews with individuals from many different corners of the organization — the digital team, the engagement team, the development team, the product and technology team, affiliates, and more. Through the process, I was able to learn a lot about being able to effectively understand user needs, data communication best practices, and also about the ACLU as a whole and all of the diverse roles within the organization. The project definitely opened my eyes to all of the careful decision making that has to go into organizing and presenting data to so many different sets of stakeholders with different experience levels, interests, and data use cases. I ended up making a series of recommendations around labeling consistencies, dashboards, and error management. Additionally, I was able to go ahead and take on one of the improvements myself by creating boards for our different user groups in order to better organize our dashboards in a less overwhelming fashion.
Alongside my main infralytics projects, I also worked with the legalytics team to scrape elections data from South Carolina and Louisiana (huge thank you to Ben and Brooke for the opportunity and for being awesome!) It is so rewarding to know that the data I pulled will go directly towards a project that strives to make voting more equitable, and it was a great way to improve my scraping skills as well. While I had initially thought that the project would largely be copy and pasting scraping code (easy peasy), this was definitely not the case. For each election batch, I had to systematically sift through the html of the pages to find the proper fields that I wanted to extract. Additionally, since data was passed to the pages through json requests, I was initially confused that I couldn’t see the actual data in the html that I scraped, and thus was able to learn how to use Selenium, an automated web driver, to click through pages and wait for the data to load before scraping them. Through the many rounds of debugging, testing, and more debugging, I learned a lot about the scraping process, and even more about creative problem solving. Furthermore, for one of the rounds of scraping, I was even able to contribute to the larger elections tracking community after my ACLU colleagues encouraged me to contribute my data to the openelections repository.
Finally, in the last few weeks of my internship I had a really cool opportunity to start looking into and deploying Prodigy, an annotation tool that makes labeling documents easier and uses NLP to reduce the amount of human work required. This project was really cool, as Prodigy is still a fairly small software, so I was able to do a lot of exploring into all of its different functionalities to see just what potential it has. Additionally, given the obscurity of the software, most issues that I ran into had no answers on Google, and so it was a great challenge and great practice to have to rely almost fully on the given documentation and problem solving with teammates to debug these.
Perhaps beyond the hard skills that I have been able to develop, it was also incredible to see and learn from the dedicated efforts my infralytics teammates and the broader analytics team took to create a welcoming, positive, and productive environment. In the short ten weeks that I was a part of the team, my team had several open discussions about how best to facilitate our work, and what changes could be made to improve the experience of being on the team. When we needed to add a new set of meetings to discuss attribution data, it quickly became apparent that it was redundant to have our check-in meeting right before on the same days, and so after a quick discussion, we seamlessly transitioned into a new weekly meeting cadence. Just over the last week, after a team member presented an article about cognitive load — and how constant digital communications tax this load — we immediately tested out having a designated distraction-free focus period followed by a walk to try and reduce this load. Rather than just accepting a status quo of “this is how things have always been,” I saw an openness from team members and leadership at all levels to embrace new ideas, and a continuous drive to actively pursue a better “ACLU analytics” from doing weekly surveys to check on the stress and satisfaction levels of team members to regular discussions around EDIB. As an intern, it was remarkable just how included I felt; I was invited to all of the regular team meetings, and I felt that my input was valued in all areas from better EDIB practices, to what article we should read at our weekly white paper Wednesdays.
As I say goodbye to this adventure, and continue onto the next, I am so grateful for this opportunity to have been on this team and am inspired by the dedication, passion, and empathy that I have seen from my teammates. I will carry forward newfound skills, improved problem solving capabilities, and perhaps most importantly, a renewed resolve to always push for improvement, to always look for better solutions, and to never settle for the status quo whether that be in terms of civil rights or in creating a healthy work environment.
