The Data Collective — Weeknote #9
Written by Mor Rubinstein, community development for the Data Collective. This blog is cross-posted from the Data Collective website.
This week has been a chilled one. Every initiative needs a calm week once in a while to reflect and think. This week also marked Open Data Day and International Women’s Day — two important days on the data community calendar.
Open Data Day
Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. For those of you who are not familiar with open data, the description given by Open Definition is that “Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose”. When it comes to the charity sector, open data is really useful and allows us to do research, get insights, and create services. For example, the ONS’ English Indices of Multiple Deprivation is one of the most used open datasets in the charity sector. It is used to help understand needs in an area and even how to distribute funding. Imagine if you could not use it in research or if you needed to pay money to acquire it! Some examples of useful open datasets can be found in the London Datastore, data.gov.uk and the NHS COVID datastore.
International Women’s Day
What does data have to do with International Women’s Day? A LOT. It is a good opportunity to learn about Data Feminism, a way to look at data using power dynamics and how we collect data about sex, gender, and other protected characteristics. Data feminism helps us to think about who is missing from our datasets and if our data helps to shift existing power structures, or maintain them. What we collect and measure counts, especially in our sector. Some initiatives you should get to know are Data2X, a UN initiative that calls to collect sex-disaggregated data; and after this week’s sad news about Sarah Everard, the UK’s Femicide Census or the standard for Femicide in Latin America.
This week also gave us a chance to reflect on community. I shared thoughts about another community that I’m part of in this blog. The Collective is a community of individuals who work in the UK social sector, and use or want to use data. However, our community channels are not always active. Slack mostly has announcements from organisers, our last Community Call had just three attendees, and we would like to get more responses to our survey. On the other hand, our workshops are well attended with good feedback and our weeknotes and newsletters are well read.
Are we missing anything? Maybe we need to have other communication channels? Maybe people have online fatigue due to so many Zoom calls and Slack / Teams channels? Perhaps we need to find a better balance between a community of people and a network of organisations. We hope that our survey can help us build a more happy and useful community for all members. But if you can, email us and let us know in one sentence what would make the community better for you. What can we do better?
Have a great weekend,
Mor and The Data Collective
Community round up
- Data jobs: We have a new listing of data jobs in the charity sector. If you have a data job to share, please send it to us!
- Social Sector Data Initiatives: We’re gathering examples of projects to improve data quality, access, or use in the UK social sector in this Google doc. If you’re involved in one or know of any that we’ve missed, please stick the link in the doc! Not sure if it’s right for this list? Add it anyway! And please share with your networks.
- Community Call: You can join us at the next Community Call at 1pm on Friday 19 March where we’ll discuss data standards — when they can be useful for charities and what resources are out there to understand them better. Register for the next call.
- Speaking opportunities: Open Data Manchester is running a third season of Pick N Mix webinars in April. Each session introduces attendees to a skill or topic of your choice — and they are looking for speakers. Your talk could be about exploring a dataset, testing out learning materials, or just talking through a specific passion project of yours! Take a look at a previous talk about Tricks & Hacks for GoogleSheets. If you’re interested or want to ask questions, get in touch with sam@opendatamanchester.org.uk
- Webinar: On 17 March, NPC is hosting a webinar, Using need and demand data to inform decision making, with Turn2Us, Buttle UK, and the British Gas Energy Trust to explain their approach to setting up the Local Needs Databank.
- Friends of the Earth: Friends of the Earth are currently evaluating their online data resources: How climate friendly is your area?; a Woodland opportunity map; greenspace access map; and their 50 point climate action plan. As well as gathering general feedback, they will be holding a workshop with people who have expertise in this area or experience working on similar projects. If you’d like to get involved get in touch with Alan on alan.gibworth@foe.co.uk
