DataKind UK looks back at 2021
This year, we were so proud to work with a fantastic network of organisations, partners, and friends to hold the 2021 Data4Good Festival, launch the Data Collective, and create our own new five-year strategy. We can’t fully express our gratitude to you all!
This was on top of our usual service offering of support for social change organisations who want to make better use of their data. We had the pleasure of working on DataDive programmes with six charities: anti-poverty organisation Turn2Us, mentoring charity Brightside, food waste organisation Fareshare, youth homelessness charity Depaul, youth mentoring service City Year, and community network The Cares Family. And six DataCorps projects: young person’s support service The Mix, young person’s unemployment charity Street League, trafficking disruptor STOP THE TRAFFIK, employment social enterprise Well Grounded, digital exchange platform Firesouls, and (an exploratory project with) anti-poverty organisation Evidence for Development.
We therefore have to say a huge thank you to all of the volunteers who joined us for DataDive and DataCorps projects this year, because we couldn’t do any of them without you! Especially the Committee members who have supported the DataKind UK staff team and programmes throughout the pandemic.
The Community Committee, who helped to make the community a welcoming place to be — Chapter Lead Dan, Holly, Stef, Luisa, and Lindsay. The Ethics Committee, who supported responsible data use for our charity partners and organised some fascinating events: the small but mighty team of Stef, Laura, and Michelle!
The Scoping and Impact Committee, who assess all of the projects we take on and help us achieve our ultimate mission of improving the Data Maturity of social change organisations. Chapter Lead Antonio was highly motivated, creative, and reliable and was supported throughout by the dream team, Sukhil, Ade, Nawaz, Tom, Claire, and Nick.
Finally, Office Hours volunteers gave hours of their time and the diversity of their expertise in surgeries and chats to answer charities’ questions. Huge thanks to the brilliant Paolo, Diego, Iris, Sam, Jo, Jen, Aileen, Delphine, Dan T, Jonathan, Alex, and Christine.
Below you can read the highlights of the past year from each of our Committee Chapter Leads.
Community Committee — Dan Sanz Becerril
ComCom’s purpose is to sustain an active and diverse community of volunteers that allows us to support DataKind UK’s programmes. Among which, we keep a close eye on our DataDive projects.
During the pandemic, we continued to improve the way in which online DataDive weekends operate, to make sure we deliver great value to charities and wonderful experiences to our volunteer data scientists.
We also upgraded our recruitment process for Data Ambassadors to make sure that we have the right people just in time, and keep them motivated and performing to the best of their ability! On top of that, we looked into the end-to-end volunteer lifecycle to find strategies to keep everyone engaged, active and taking on new challenges even during these trying times. We loved organising Data Ambassador Open Evenings, two summer parties (one remote and another in person in Regent’s Park) and a winter party for the community.
Finally, our team also had the honour of trialling some Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Training thanks to Stef. You’ll all hear more about that in the coming year!
Ethics Committee — Stef Garasto
2021 was the first fully remote year for DataKind UK’s Ethics Committee. Given how much embedding ethics within an organisation relies on engaging people in conversation, this was not without its challenges. It did not stop us, though!
We organised three ethics-focused events: a watch party and panel discussion on the documentary Coded Bias (highly recommended if you haven’t watched it yet!), a conversation on Web Scraping (TL;DR: planning on doing web scraping for good? Ask for advice) and a good old fashioned book club on Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (an instant classic, as relevant as ever).
We also launched our Practitioner’s Guide to Data Ethics, which caught the attention of the Open Innovations organisation (formerly ODI Leeds). We discussed the Practitioner’s Guide and the rest of our work at the Panel on Ethical Issues in the Data Science and AI for Good Movement as part of DataKind’s Volunteer Summit 2021. We trialled having ethics representatives in DataKind UK’s long-running DataCorps projects, working with Street League, The Mix and STOP THE TRAFFIK. Last but not least, we delivered two sessions of our ethics training to volunteers and staff from partners’ organisations.
It was an exciting year to be working on responsible data science. With ex-Googler Timnit Gebru launching her own AI institute (among many other developments in the field), we can’t wait to see what next year brings!
Scoping & Impact Committee — Antonio Campello and Data Science Lead Dulcie Vousden
2021 was another busy and fun year for our Scoping and Impact Committee, whose purpose is to ensure DataKind UK picks the best projects to work on and measures the impact of those projects. For those who like numbers, we conducted 13 data maturity or impact assessment calls with charities (a total of 26 hours) so we have a great understanding of how we can improve data maturity in the sector.
We discussed and approved seven DataDives and three DataCorps applications, covering a broad range of work including mentoring organisations, advice providers, food distributors, and charities tackling homelessness; and a broad range of techniques, from more traditional statistics, to mapping, web scraping, natural language processing, and even briefly considering computer vision!
Over the year, we also had the opportunity to reflect and improve upon our processes for conducting data maturity assessments; evaluating the impact of our own projects; and choosing which projects to pursue. We were empowered to rescope projects to increase their chances of success.
We have lots of ideas and ambitions for 2022, including improving our data collection processes, conducting more thorough data audits, and engaging more directly with Data Ambassadors. Stay tuned!
If you’d like to join our volunteer community and find out more, please take a look at our Volunteering website page.
