The Justice Hub — In Numbers
The Justice Hub initiative was part of the Data for Justice challenge — curated by Agami in 2019. In this blog, we will explore a few key engagement-related metrics related to users, datasets, and the larger Justice Hub community.
Contents
➡ The Challenge 🏆
➡ The Launch 🚀
➡ The current state of the Justice Hub
➡ Most viewed and downloaded datasets
➡ Categories with most datasets
➡ Substack (The DataforJustice Newsletter)
The Challenge 🏆
Researchers, journalists, civil society organisations, law firms, and companies have invested significant time and resources to create valuable datasets in the field of law and justice. What if they could share, build upon, and collaborate on each other’s datasets and tools? What if easy-to-use tools could enable the analysis and interoperability of diverse datasets? It could lead to more insightful data-driven projects, grow the community of active data users and spur a collaborative culture that improves our systems of law and justice.
The challenge fund was divided into two categories. The first category was about building a Hub that encourages users to share and co-create datasets. In the second category, researchers, civil society organisations, and journalists were asked to propose compelling and strategic data-driven projects in law and justice. The data curated through these case studies will be used as seed datasets for the Hub.
The jury selected 5 winning teams — CivicDataLab for the ‘create a hub’ track and Project 39A, NLU Delhi, HAQ Centre for Child Rights, NIPFP & IGIDR for the ‘create datasets’ track.
The Launch 🚀
We kick-started the development process by setting up an advisory board and speaking to potential users and contributors of datasets related to Law and Justice. This helped us in understanding the gaps and challenges in making law and justice datasets more accessible.
Interoperability between datasets, well-defined Taxonomy, standardised datasets across geographies, and availability of key administrative datasets in one place were a few things highlighted by the community.
The first priority was building a hub where we can start curating datasets. We collaborated with TwistOpen for conducting Design Research to finalise the UI, UX, and Information Architecture of the portal. Almost the entire initial development of the Justice Hub coincided with the pandemic. After seeding the Hub with a few initial datasets, we were able to launch the Justice Hub in Feb 2021 🎉.
In the last 17 months, we were able to upload a few datasets on the Justice Hub, launched a few initiatives to curate datasets with the community, developed tools to make certain datasets much more accessible, and even conducted workshops to share and promote the best practices on working with public datasets.
Let’s have a look at some of our key metrics.
The Current State of the Justice Hub
- Currently, 301 users have registered on the Justice Hub, 170 datasets (collection of files) have been uploaded and approx 3300 files have been downloaded. Anyone with an internet connection can download the datasets uploaded on the Hub. A user needs to register themselves only if they wish to upload any datasets.
- Post the launch, Justice Hub has received close to 33,000 Pageviews
- The Hub gets more traffic through desktop (60%) than mobile (40%)
- There have been close to 1,50,000 impressions on Google. Total impressions is calculated as the number of times a user saw a link to the site in search results.
- In terms of traffic sources, Direct (a user directly landing on the Justice Hub) ranks on top followed by Organic Search (via Google) which is followed by Referral (Newsletter, and other websites with backlinks), and then Social Media websites (like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)
- Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Kolkata, Lucknow — These cities contribute most to the web traffic coming from within the country.
Most viewed and downloaded datasets
Categories with most datasets
To make it easier for users to explore and download data, we created a few categories (groups). After a user uploads a dataset to the Justice Hub, we assign the dataset to one of the categories. Let’s look at the number of datasets within each of these categories.
Note: A dataset can be present in more than one category.
Insights
- The Budgets for Justice and the Union Budget groups contain union and state-level budget datasets that are related to the law and justice sector. These were uploaded as part of the Budgets for Justice campaign.
- The Summer of Data group refers to the datasets that were uploaded as part of the Summer of Data initiative. These datasets contain information related to the profile of the Judges of various High Courts across the country. These datasets are also part of the Courts and Judges groups.
The Justice Hub Community
Substack (Newsletter) 📰
At present, 292 people subscribe to The Data for Justice Newsletter. The newsletter is our primary medium of long-form engagement with the Justice Hub community. The first post was published on Feb 02nd, 2021.
- The first post was delivered to 41 subscribers. The latest post (#42), published on March 04th, 2022, was delivered to 269 subscribers.
- 80% of our subscriptions happened in the first 3–4 months of the launch, till May 2021.
- Till March 2022, we were publishing 2–3 posts a month. On an average, we observed 7–10 subscriptions per month ( Between May 2021 till March 2022)
- The average open rate is between 40–45%
Some of the key engagement-related metrics for Substack are:
- #opens — The total number of times your email has been opened. If one person opens your email five times, that counts as five opens
- open rate — The number of unique people who opened your email, divided by total email recipients. For the purpose of calculating open rate, if one person opens your email five times, that counts as one open
- likes — The number of people who’ve liked a post
Top posts on Substack
Justice Hub has 993 followers on Twitter. We use this platform to share info about the latest datasets uploaded on the Hub and to keep the community informed about our initiatives, events, meetups, webinars, etc. Recently we experimented with Twitter Spaces (a kind of podcast) to engage with our partners during the launch of the Budgets for Justice Campaign.
- We saw more than 20K tweet impressions consistently in the first 4 months (Feb — May, 2021). In March 2021, we observed more than 51K tweet impressions, the most to date.
- We added close to 50% of followers in the first three months.
- Till now, we have had close to 60K profile visits. Half of these visits were observed in the month of Jan and Feb, 2022.
- Engagement during initiatives — Our tweet impressions and profile visits increased significantly during these initiatives.
➡ In May and June 2021, we conducted the Summer of Data series to engage with students from various law universities across the country.
➡ In Jan and Feb 2022, we initiated the Budgets for Justice campaign where we used the Twitter platform to conduct discussions with our partners using Twitter Spaces. The recordings from these sessions can be accessed here.
Way ahead for the Justice Hub 🐾
- Going forward, we would like to set up a public dashboard for users to explore and analyse the traffic, reach and engagement-related metrics. This will also help the data contributors to track the reach of the datasets which they shared on the Hub.
- We are exploring more collaboration opportunities within the community to work on creating and adopting more data standards, accessible tools, better public documentation, etc.
- We will continue our collaboration with more students and universities to enrich and update the datasets created through the Summer of Data campaign.
- Last year, we conducted an online workshop on data management, data analysis and other aspects of data-related research. This year, we’re planning to conduct more online and in-person sessions for our partners. We’re also looking to partner with law universities to share this knowledge directly with the students who are interested in conducting empirical research in the areas of law and justice.
We look forward to your feedback ️🔊
We thank all our community members who have supported the Justice Hub till now. We will keep engaging with you to find out how Justice Hub can play a key role in enhancing the accessibility of law and justice related-datasets and information for a diverse audience.
Do share your suggestions. We welcome and appreciate your feedback.
