Data Charrette (2015-2017)

Community-Driven Data for Good

The data charrette was 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 – collaborated with local nonprofit service organizations on applied data analysis. Over the course of a day, they took 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 followed 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 made 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 meant 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.