Data Society: We’re Finding the Toilet Paper (And Other Crucial Supplies)

Our partners at Data Society share what they’re excited to work on with OurStreets Supplies

This piece was written by our partners at Data Society and republished with their permission. You can see their original post here!

Earlier this month, we published a post to start solving a key problem that we were seeing: lack of supplies at grocery stores and uneven distribution across locations. Every empty shelf represents another trip that someone will need to make and another risk of exposure to COVID-19.

With the higher cost and delays of delivery services becoming more pronounced, it’s more important than ever to arm our communities with real-time information about the availability of essential supplies. But how can we collect all that data quickly and effectively? Luckily, we have a plan for that.

Data Society is proud to announce our partnership with OurStreets, a company that uses community-driven data to analyze and solve real-world problems. We both realized that we were working towards solving the same problem and joined forces to combine their robust platform with our data science expertise.

To that end, we’re excited to announce the launch of OurStreets Supplies, a new intuitive reporting tool that gives users the power to track and report essential supplies at neighborhood stores, making shopping trips more efficient to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

We realize that asking grocery stores for their data during such a stressful and overwhelming time would only distract them from their core mission to serve their communities. By starting off with crowdsourced data, we can collect and analyze data immediately without any additional work from retailers.

Here’s what we’re most excited about (data-scientifically speaking):

1. Building recommendation algorithms to direct people to the least-crowded stores in their area with the supplies they need
2. Predicting shortages and trends that retailers and municipalities can use to inform their supply chain decisions
3. Using natural language processing and image processing on the pictures and comments that people leave to better identify trends and feedback

Now, the fun part: how can you help?

1. Download OurStreets. OurStreets Supplies is available today in the OurStreets app on the App Store and Google Play
2. Report what’s available. Use OurStreets Supplies to report what you’re able and not able to find when you make your next safe shopping trip. More data means OurStreets Supplies will be more useful to those who need it most
3. Provide feedback. OurStreets Supplies was built quickly to meet the moment and OurStreets and Data Society are excited to continue expanding its feature set and usefulness. Share feedback with us at contact@ourstreets.com

During these uncertain times, we’re working together to solve the everyday challenges that we’re encountering in our socially-distanced life. By providing supply-level information to everyone before they go grocery shopping, we’re hoping to make at least one decision easier to make: where to go for the supplies that you need (and yes, that includes toilet paper).