Data Charrette
Community-Driven Data for Good
The data charrette is a recurring service event in which professionals, students, and community members from a wide range of fields – computer science, data science, math and statistics, business, biology, public health, graphic design, and the social and behavioral sciences, among others – collaborate with local nonprofit service organizations on applied data analysis. Over the course of a day, they take the project through the complete data science cycle: defining goals, obtaining data, wrangling data (with some pre-wrangling conducted by program volunteers), exploring and visualizing data, modeling data, and interpreting the results to answer the organization’s operational questions. At the end of the event, the nonprofits received a complete analysis, all visualizations and code, and a template for continuing the work so they could continue to improve the services that they provide.
The Data Charrette follows the examples set by the globally-oriented organization, DataKind.org, and the wonderful, student-run A2 Data Dive of the University of Michigan, as well as our own experience with previous iterations of this event.
What makes the Data Charrette unique is that it is hosted by an undergraduate institution – Utah Valley University – with an emphasis on including non-technical students, professionals, and community members. We learned from our experience that the ability to frame questions, coordinate activities, facilitate communication, and make the results interpretable and useful – which can be done by people from any background – are as important as the technical aspects of data manipulation and statistical modeling. What this means was that people with little or no experience in working with data are fully encouraged to come and participate, along with the coders, analysts, and designers.
Upcoming Charrette
After a hiatus, the Data Charrette returned to UVU in Orem, Utah, in November of 2023 as a twice-yearly event. Our next scheduled event will be on Saturday, 13 April 2024, where we will be collaborating with two nonprofits:
Encircle is a Utah-based nonprofit that provides support groups, programs, and therapy for LGBTQ+ youth, young adults, and their families. Encircle has four locations in Utah: Salt Lake City, Provo, Heber, and St. George. The Data Charrette will help Encircle work with data from Google Trends, which will help them determine interest in important topics by location and across time. Volunteers can help with this project remotely, including contributions before the April 13 event.
Bicycle Collective is another Utah-based nonprofit, with locations in Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, and St. George. They “promote cycling as an effective and sustainable form of transportation and recreation, and a cornerstone of a cleaner, healthier, and safer society. We provide refurbished bicycles and educational programs to the community focusing on children and lower income households.” (They also organize the excellent “Bike Prom” that takes place in Salt Lake City in September of each year.) The Data Charrette will help Bicycle Collective connect their published outcome reports with larger-scale data on the environmental and economic impact of cycling. Volunteers can also help with this project remotely, including contributions before the April 13 event.
In addition to these two organizations that we will support this spring, we are developing event materials – promotional resources; handbooks for volunteers and nonprofits; templates for code, analyses, and presentations – that can be shared freely with other institutions and organizations, so that local Data Charrettes can be created around the globe.
Event Details
Saturday, 13 April 2024, from 10am to 4pm, Mountain Daylight Time (UTC -06:00)
Utah Valley University Orem Campus, Clarke Building 410A, 815 College Drive, Orem, UT 84058
Parking is free on Saturday in the student/staff/faculty lots but NOT in the designated “pay for parking” areas