Data for Society: What, How, and Why
Written by the DSH coordination team*
Une version française de ce billet a été publiée ici.
Public services and community organizations on the ground need the best tools to better understand the populations they serve and thus direct their actions to support them. With this in mind, the Montréal in Common innovation community launched the Data for Society Hub (DSH) to design a technological solution for sharing, visualizing, and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. This initiative will contribute to the well-being and health of citizens by developing the collective intelligence of stakeholders and by democratizing accessibility to social data.
What are social data?
The work of the DSH, coordinated by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM), builds on a conception of social data as data contributing directly or indirectly to the understanding of social issues and informing the practices that have been or should be adopted. Therefore, these can consist of economic, administrative, real estate, geographical, etc. data. Data become “social” through a process of analysis aimed at learning more about the communities that inhabit a territory. To do so, it is necessary to take advantage of all the data available on these communities and this territory.
The social data that will be integrated into the solution will come from multiple sources: open data from the City of Montréal, scholarly work, statistics from partner organizations, cultural productions, new data resulting from the cross-referencing and analysis of public datasets, etc. At present, the public, para-public, and community sectors generally carry out their data collection and processing activities in isolation, with limited teams and resources.
Aim of the Data for Society Hub
The DSH wants to fill this technological and organisational gap by putting an end to the siloed work of various stakeholders. This project aims to collect and organize social data produced by a range of actors for quick and common access.
Project partners, their collaborators, and the Montréal in Common ecosystem will be able to share these data thanks to the creation of a data governance model that guarantees the ethical and legal acceptability of their use. They will also be organized and enhanced through a series of visualization tools such as dynamic tables and maps in order to facilitate their browsing and the creation of meaning. Offering much more than a single, static representation of a problem, the integration of new data will be ongoing throughout the systematization of processes.
Making the Most of Social Data: A 5-year Project
Spanning one year (2020–2021), the start-up phase of the DSH allowed the coordination team to explore a potential solution in terms of technology and governance. Partners expressed their needs, gave their opinion on the direction of the work, and discussed a joint leadership framework.
Based on these conversations, CIRM has developed technological tools and consultation processes that will be tested by the partners during the implementation phase in 2022–2024. The team will also deepen its knowledge of data governance models in order to establish the one that best fits the type of partnership chosen, the objectives of the data exchange, and the nature of the data itself.
The working hypothesis under evaluation is based on the creation of a flexible and evolving association with regard to the development of the DSH and regular feedback from partners. The Montréal Association for Data Governance (tentative designation) will seek to meet the expectations and principles dictated by the City of Montréal in its Digital Data Charter (2020).
Our next blog posts will look at each of the elements that comprise it:
● the Commun Axiom software suite (sharing tools);
● the Montréal Observatory of Social Issues (visualization tools);
● the Laboratory for Collective Narratives and Discourse Analysis (textual data analysis tools).
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*Copywriting and translation: Julie Levasseur; content editing: Karolyne Arseneault, Pascal Brissette and Audray Fontaine; translation editing: Karolina Roman
