New York City Datadive
On the weekend of October 14th, 2011, over 50 engaged data scientists, developers, and digital do-gooders got together to work on using data for social change at our New York Datadive. Teams worked with the UN Global Pulse, The Microfinance Information Exchange Market (MIX Market), and the New York Civil Liberties Union to better understand their data and build visualizations, analyses, and applications around them. You can view the results for each group below and see pictures of the event on our Flickr account.
// MIX Market
How Do You Scrape 20 Different Sites Into One Database?
The Microfinance Information Exchange Market was interested in gathering more data about microfinance loans taking place in Africa. In order to do this, they needed to scrape information from over 20 banking institutions in different formats and from different websites. See how DataKind worked with MIX to deliver a year’s worth of data scraping work to them in just over 24 hours.
// The New York Civil Liberties Union
Is the NYPD Using Racial Discrimination When Stopping and Frisking?
The NYCLU came to our Datadive wondering if they could better understand whether the NYPD was using racial discrimination or not. By looking at publicly available data of stop-and-frisks going back to 2006, the team was able to better understand this thorny issue and created maps and visualizations that breathed life into the data. See how DataKind worked with NYCLU to create tools to better understand the NYPD’s data.
// The United Nations Global Pulse
What Is The Global State of Happiness?
The UN Global Pulse brought two very interesting datasets to our Datadive, one containing satellite images of crops in Africa that were given fertilizer treatments and one on a global survey of happiness. In the first case they wanted to deduce how useful the treatments were, and in the second they wanted to understand the nature of the survey results and how the data was collected. See how DataKind worked with the UN Global Pulse to create visualizations of their data and how this bridging of communities is so critical that it was presented to the UN General Assembly!