CivicDataLab signs an MoU with NLU Odisha
Partnering with the university to work on more data-driven initiatives
Last week our team visited the campus of National Law University (NLU), Odisha. We were there to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the university for conducting capacity-building sessions for students, faculty members and non-teaching staff on data management, data analysis and other aspects of data-related research. As a part of this collaboration, we will also be setting up a data help desk in collaboration with the Center for Law, Public Policy and Good Governance, a research center at NLU Odisha, to support data-based research.
The Need — Supporting the community to work with public datasets
We are ardent supporters of open data and reproducible research practices. But at the same time, we also need to be aware of the composition of the legal research community and cannot always expect our members to follow these practices and principles. We work with lawyers, journalists, legal researchers, etc who often don’t have a background in technology and don’t necessarily receive formal training in conducting data-based research.
While talking to data contributors and other users within the Justice Hub, we noticed that most often the community is not opposed to sharing data in principle. But the core challenge they face is in implementing the process to open their datasets in their workflow. Most people need support with data processing and data management skills and often the resources accounted for a project undermine the time and effort needed to make datasets accessible.
The Justice Hub
The Justice Hub is an open data platform that makes law and justice-related datasets more open and accessible. The platform was launched in February 2021 and since then we have been able to open up a few datasets, start a few initiatives, and work towards creating a small yet thriving community of justice data contributors and users.
One of the key focus areas for the Justice Hub is to conduct data and tech-related training for institutes working on research and advocacy in the areas of law and justice. The field of quantitative legal research in our country is still at a nascent stage and we believe that we can curate many more important research initiatives and create useful datasets through regular support and training to students and legal researchers on handling and managing datasets.
The Challenge — Accessing public data is hard, and conducting reproducible research is harder
A quantitative research initiative begins with formulating a set of questions that might help us in testing our hypothesis. We then need to collect data points to answer these questions. Often these data points are available across multiple data sources. With an ever-increasing supply of data, we now face the challenge of having to effectively deal with it in order to understand and use it.
Working with public datasets or curating data points that are not readily present in the public domain, either through requests made under the Right to Information (RTI) Act or conducting interviews, surveys, etc. are resource-intensive tasks. In this regard, some of the most common challenges we observed are:
- Public data sources are not always easily discoverable.
- Often the data available through public sources is not well documented.
- Data points are made available through PDF files. PDF files are good for reports, but one cannot explore and analyse data using PDFs.
- Lack of awareness about open source tools for processing and analysing data.
- Lack of documentation about steps taken to process and analyse datasets. To conduct exploratory data analysis, one often uses spreadsheet-based tools like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc. These tools provide a rich user interface for processing data but don’t preserve the history of the steps taken. One has to document and record all the steps performed explicitly so others can reproduce the processed dataset in the same manner.
- Issues within data processing and analysis are harder to resolve since the data provenance measures are not in place.
- Users do not have much experience with tasks related to data exploration, analysis and publication.
An Opportunity
In this context, we believe that a great opportunity for the Justice Hub to enable people to use, access and share more datasets lies in:
- Investing in building the capacity of organizations and institutions to collect, process and manage datasets.
- Engaging and supporting data contributors when they are in the process of collecting the data, by providing support, co-creating data templates and more.
- Creating opportunities for the community to collaboratively contribute, share and re-use datasets for public good.
Students as part of the open justice data movement
During the Summer of Data initiative, we got an opportunity to interact with the students from various law universities across the country. This was our first attempt to bring law students into the open justice data movement. In the first edition, the students collaborated to curate background profiles of High Court judges across India. At the end of this exercise, the students were onboarded as data contributors as they had contributed close to 25 datasets on the Justice Hub.
This MoU will give us an opportunity to collaborate with many more students, faculty members and researchers and we hope to see many more contributions to the Justice Hub as we progress ahead. We will be working to collaborate with other law universities and would like to see many more data-driven research initiatives coming out of these institutions which can further contribute to improving the state of important judicial initiatives within our states.
Working with Datasets — Learning modules
Till now, we have been collaborating with civil society organisations to conduct data-driven research. We developed the Zombie Tracker with the Internet Freedom Foundation and co-authored the POCSO Implementation report in collaboration with HAQ — Centre for Child Rights. We have been conducting data workshops for a few civil society organizations to share our learnings from these initiatives and cover key concepts around working with public datasets. These learning modules are free to access and share under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY SA 4.0) license.
If you’re interested in attending these sessions, or you would like us to organise group sessions, please write to us at info@justicehub.in.
We’re Hiring — Apply soon!!
If this sounds interesting to you and you are keen to collaborate with us to take this initiative ahead, do apply for the Justice Hub — Data and Policy Associate. We need more hands and ideas to enable everyone to see and solve justice problems using data.
