Our First 1,000 Volunteers
A new volunteer, Alex, recently told me about a dream he had. In his dream, Alex visited some old friends who were feeling hopeless in a world where science and facts are under attack. He convinced those friends that they could bring the data science community together and change the course of the country using the power of statistics, machine learning, and technology. They’d call their project: Data for Democracy. Inspired by his dream, Alex raced to his laptop when he woke up and Googled “Data for Democracy.” Upon discovering that we already exist, he signed up.
Alex isn’t the only one interested in leveraging his data and technology skills for social good. Over the past few months there’s been an excitement and commitment to civic engagement in the tech community that I’ve never seen before. People are stepping up. As of today, over 1,000 data scientists, software engineers, and technologists have joined Data for Democracy.
They’re contributing to dozens of active projects as data engineers, by compiling Medicare spending and election results data and making it available to the public, building infrastructure for mining social media, and combining crime data from cities across the country. They’re contributing as data scientists, developing statistical models to reduce traffic fatalities in conjunction with the City of Boston, and using natural language processing for projects as varied as understanding refugee displacement for the International Displacement Monitoring Centre and investigating the behavior of far-right extremists. They’re contributing as software engineers, building tools to support organizations like the National Immigration Law Center, who are standing up for the rights of immigrants, and the Indivisible movement, who are helping citizens get engaged and affect change in the political process. And across Data for Democracy, dedicated people are making these projects possible by volunteering as project managers, who keep us focused, community organizers, who foster collaboration and inclusiveness, and storytellers who share our work with the world.
It’s not only individuals. Many corporations have reached out to support the work of our volunteers. Data.world, a data publishing and collaboration platform, has dedicated countless hours of staff time sourcing datasets and assisting projects that want to make data more accessible to the public. Eventador, a streaming data platform, has been active in the community, directly supporting our data engineering teams, building pipelines and hosting integrations with analytics products — like Mode Analytics, for example, who are letting us use their SQL-based visualization product for exploratory data analysis and dashboard building. Finally, Domino Data Labs has donated their platform for collaborative data science.
Like in Alex’s dream, when we started Data for Democracy, it was simply a place to organize — for technologists to gather around the idea that we’re participants in our political systems. The tech community is part of the discussion, and we’re just as responsible for upholding democratic values as anyone else. I’m inspired by the community that has formed around these ideas. I’m humbled that many of the early volunteers have dedicated so much time and energy into leading our most active projects. And I’m excited to see new volunteers with a sense of ownership in the community, starting new projects, welcoming new members, and helping to build a sustainable community that manages itself.
Now where do we go from here?
This is a defining moment. On the one hand, we’re faced with the greatest threats to our democratic values in a generation. But technologists are responding to those threats with an energy and conviction that will imbue the tech community with a sense of civic responsibility for generations to come. So while we’ll always work to make Data for Democracy welcoming and productive, we’re shifting from an internal focus on the community itself, to an external focus on our community’s relationship with the broader tech community and the public.
In practice, we’re working on three big initiatives over the next 30 days to make this possible:
1. Storytelling. Especially for our ongoing investigations, we’re encouraging writers and storytellers in Data for Democracy to work with our data engineers and data scientists to share the insights gained from their research with the broader public. We’ve also reached out to data journalists outside of D4D, both to make sure they’re aware of our open datasets and to encourage them to collaborate with our volunteers.
2. Project management. While some projects have dozens of contributors, each is led by a small group of volunteers who take responsibility for its focus and direction. This is more complex in projects that have elements of data science and software engineering, further complicated by the fact that often a large number of volunteers are contributing in their spare time. While we expand the number of partners we work with, we’re ensuring that a dedicated project manager and technical lead are assigned to every project with a concrete deliverable.
3. Technology partnerships. As our projects grow, our access to data storage, compute, and other resources for machine learning and analysis becomes more essential. We’ll be working with more providers who share our sense of civic responsibility, and want to make their technology available to our growing community of data scientists, data engineers, and software developers.
Thank you, to all of our volunteers. Your energy and enthusiasm are what makes Data for Democracy possible. Here’s to the next 1,000 members who will make our community even stronger.
