“Data For Good is dead, long live Data For Good!”
As the founder and co-organizer of Sydney Data for Democracy for the past 15 months, I had an amazing time gathering smart and driven volunteers around data for good projects. Among them we had the creme de la creme: Data scientists who wanted to apply their skills for the common good but also driven students from various fields; researchers; data enthusiasts; consultants;… All of them had one common point: the willingness to use their skills for the social good.
But as one folk singer said once, The Times They Are a-Changin’. Looking at the data, as we always do, the increasing turnover rate and the decreasing number of projects completed have been far from satisfying. The assumptions we had made a few months ago were still lying in the limbo of a changes log. As volunteers, we hadn’t enough time to manage and organize more projects. It is time to understand what how we can improve, get closer to our mission and launch our next chapter, Civita.
— What we did —
Data for Democracy is a large community of data scientists volunteers.
We mostly had two kinds of projects: supporting charities with their data challenges and raising awareness about particular issues with open data. While we collaborated quite independently from the global community, we had (and will still maintain!) a #city-sydney and #city-australia channels on the D4D slack.
Each month we would gather to share our findings and work in person. Some of our projects have given great results (e.g. the Refugees Welcome support group, the ANOVA’s insights on degrees’ opportunities, etc.)
But we were also hoping to be a hub for driven people to connect and hopefully create synergies.
— What we could have done better —
The Data for Good space has by nature an unclear vision and strategy. As this great article explains, this space involves helping the social sector, volunteering, providing open source tools and educate the communities. As a community, we also added another layer of unclarity by assuming everyone knew what they wanted to work on and had enough time and energy to manage the project they were on.
As a typical product person, I asked for feedbacks to most of the people who took the journey with us at some point. Here are the most common comments from them:
“[needs] clear guided on how to contribute to projects”
“I’m not sure what D4D wants.”
“Not always sure how much time I can contribute.”
Then, as a data person, I also looked at our current success metric — the number of members of our community — and, while that number was a good-looking stat to share around, we couldn’t lie to ourselves and translate this number into a success story. That success metric was actually the essence of what we needed to improve: our focus.
We were community-focus instead of impact-focus.
These takeovers can be broken down into the following observations:
1.The nature of skilled volunteering itself. This is a typical economic problem — Supply vs. Demand. The projects volunteers choose to work on depend more on what they want to learn than the actual need of the project. They see it as the trade for the free time they are giving, which is fair enough. The consequence of this, especially is the data for good space, is that most of the current challenges do not involve any sophisticated models. Some of them still need the data itself.
Which leads to my second point:
2.The not-for-profit world is often not ready for data science. More than that, they can lack the resources to implement and support our insights. We live in our narrative self and keep thinking that we are having an impact but some of these data for good projects are only thrown in the air and make our ego shine.
Which leads to my third point:
3.We have only focused on data and not what creates, supports and implements it. Data is a voice and we need to hear it and to write it down. We have been focusing a lot on one field that is naturally used and supported by many more.
Beside of this introspection, we also know that we achieved some great outcomes and we want to keep progressing. This is why, I am super excited to present you the little sister of Sydney Data for Democracy, Civita!
What is Civita?
With Civita, we want to create opportunities for collaboration between the data/tech community and social-driven organizations for innovative and sustainable solutions.
In November 2018, we organized a pilot project that could potentially resolve these questions. This hackathon was gathering the community and the not-for-profit organizations in one room for three hours. Participants were in direct contact with the charities and could kick-off their ideas straight away in that room. The winners were then later in contact with the charities after the hackathon to implement their solutions.
Civita answers the above challenges in the following way (starting from the bottom):
1.Going beyond data science and incentivize participants from other fields to join us and complete the skills range. This can include finding tech projects to collect data, assessing the right strategy with the charities, adding UX skills to the insights presented.
Which leads to the second solution:
2.Becoming impact-focus. With the right mix of skills, the solution found should take into account the level of maturity of the organization the volunteers help and the skills of the team or the person who will take over the project after the hackathon.
Which leads to the third solution:
3.Introducing structure and a framework. By giving a three hours time slot where they can only focus on this, organising in advance teams with skills and experiences that complete each others, creating a concrete post-event recognition for their work, we want to start minimising any friction for our community and help them focusing only on the experience itself.
With these resolutions, Civita will shift the focus from the community to the impact and still take into consideration the needs of the individuals who make that community.
