Data for Democracy's mission is to be an inclusive community for data scientists and technologists to volunteer and collaborate on projects that make a positive impact on society.
- Read more about our our origin story.
- We use slack and github as our primary means of organization and communication. Email jonathon [at] datafordemocracy.org for an invite to the team.
- Read about our current projects, or check out how you can volunteer across the community.
- If you see a project you are interested in, join the project slack channel, introduce yourself to the community and the project lead(s).
- Visit project readme for specific instructions on who to contact or how to get started.
- Not sure which project you want to join? Introduce yourself in #general. Talk to a few project leads, let them know what you are interested in. Project leads can help you determine if a project is a good fit for you.
- Have an idea for a new project? Join #project-ideas to start a discussion on a new project.
- Looking for a certain type of task, in any project? Check the task digest.
- Not sure how to get started? Contact @gecky or @jonathon in the Slack, or check out the #onboarding channel, and we'll help you out.
- Want to pick up some skills before diving in? Check out the tutorials which are all relevant to D4D projects and chat about it in #learning.
- Check out our data.world page at data.world/data4democracy, where data can be shared. See our guide to get started. Contact @sya or @gabriela in Slack with questions
While most of our work is project based, the community is large and vibrant enough that we're looking for common needs across projects that the organization can support. These are ongoing roles that can be time consuming, but are also essential to making the community helpful to our partners and a valuable experience for our volunteers. Ping @jonathon in Slack if you'd like to help with the following:
All of our projects are doing some interesting data gathering and analysis that we'd love to share with the world. We'd like to start publishing regular blog posts highlighting these resources, scheduling short interviews for the Partially Derivative podcast, and discussing our work on social media so the larger community knows what we're doing and gets to see our work in progress. If you want to write, edit, tweet, and ideally organize this process, we'd like to hear from you.
We're doing this on a per-project basis, and would love someone to manage this process -- from GitHub access, to data sharing, to AWS permissions, and everything in between.
The community has grown to a point where there is a lot of activity and a steady stream of new volunteers, which is awesome! We could use more people who know about the various projects that are happening along with the skills of the incoming volunteers, and can both match people to projects (ideally, to specific tasks), along with routinely surfacing new opportunities to the broader community for folks to get involved at all skill levels. @gecky and the individual project leads have been going above and beyond in this regard, and they need your help.
We have many projects going in our slack community. Below is a list of some of our more active projects that are actively seeking help.
Slack: #assemble
Project Description: Community working to build tools and infrastructure to enable the study of online communities and their characteristics. As we work through our own projects, our goal is to build a toolkit which takes care of common tasks so researchers do not have to reinvent the wheel with each new project.
Project Leads: @bstarling @nick
Project Description: This is an official collaboration between the City of Boston's Analytics Team and Data for Democracy. We want to build a crash prediction modeling application. This would combine things like our crowdsourced safety concerns dataset and crash reports with a wide range of other data from our own open data portal as well as from other sources like the state's transportation and transit agencies, weather conditions feeds, and traffic reports from sites like Google. The end result will be a set of dynamic predictions we can use to identify potential trouble spots and direct timely safety interventions--everything from protected bike lanes and better-marked crosswalks to new street lights and traffic light timings. We'll make this publicly-available to everyone through a hosted map application, and develop the project as an open source template that can be adapted for use by other cities.
Slack: #boston-crash-modeling
Project Leads: @therriault (City of Boston lead), @niccolley (Data for Democracy lead)
Slack: #drug-spending
Project Description: Help the public understand what their tax dollars are going toward. Eg, what % of the eligible population (and/or all Americans) are benefiting from Medicare prescription drug coverage? How many Medicare enrollees are being treated for common/relatable conditions like diabetes, Alzheimer's, or depression? What proportion of Medicare prescription spending is on each of those conditions?
Project Leads: @jenniferthompson @mattgawarecki
Data: data.world/data4democracy/drug-spending
Slack: #election-transparency
Project Description: Aggregating and normalizing county-level election results to be shared with the broader community.
Project Leads: @chris_dick, @scottcame, @rachelanddata
Data: data.world/data4democracy/election-transparency
Project Description:
Classifying, tagging, analyzing and visualizing news events about internal displacement.
Project Lead: @georgerichardson
Slack: #propublica
Project Description: Working on projects to support the non-profit investigative journalism publication, ProPublica. The team's first project is analyzing campaign spending data.
Project Leads: @ryanes @eric_bickel
Data: data.world/data4democracy/propublica
Slack: #usa-dashboard
Project Description: A dashboard of key metrics for the USA. The team's first KPIs are around city-level crime data.
Project Leads: @sjt
If you're looking for a certain type of task (e.g. beginner-friendly) to lead you to a project, try checking the links below: