Project Structure

My hope in starting this project was that I would be able to engage a community of people who are passionate about this issue and about the ethical use of data. Engaging collaborators will enable us to gather more data, process more analyses and share our findings with an even broader community. My ultimate hope is that this work will enable decision makers to formulate effective strategy to reduce violence.

Creating an Analysis

An analysis represents an effort to answer a question, test a hypothesis or even just explore a data set. For each analysis I've started by stating the intent of the analysis and then searching for the data required to support that analysis. Once I've processed the the data and complete the analysis, I document it and push it to the repository in a separate directory. The directory contains the data sets employed in the analysis, graphs that were generated and a write up of the conclusions. I also create a wiki page with the same name as the directory. The wiki page provides a quick overview of the analysis and provides a description of the data set.

Storing and Sharing Data

The analysis directory contains a summarized view that's structured to support that specific piece of work. While this might be reusable for some work, other analyses might require going back to a more granular representation of the data. So I've created the directory "raw_data" to store the raw data sources I've collected.

The Story Wall

Ideas for further areas of exploration keep evolving, even while I'm working on completing the current effort. So that I don't forget these ideas, I've used the issues list on GitHub as a story list. Any ideas are captured as a new issue. Feel free to do the same. A desired outcome would be that collaborators would use this list to pick up topics to investigate and share the work.

Join Me!

If you are interested in being a collaborator, e-mail a request [here.](mailto: john.m.spens@gmail.com).