Data experts unite for charity
Non-profits often lack information
Organizers liken it to the “big bang” — an explosion of data to finally help the information-starved not-for-profit sector understand itself and the money available.
More than 100 data scientists gathered for a 24-hour marathon of volunteer analysis this weekend, pulling together massive never-before-available data sets from Canadian Mental Health Association 211 calls for help and government grants.
“It’s the big bang explosion of data and information,” said Bryan Jackson, Data For Good Edmonton director who helped organize the event with the Edmonton Community Foundation. A similar event was held in Calgary.
By the end of the datathon, the group had four gigabytes of data stored in a common place on a Government of Alberta server, he said, which is “insane. No one has this collection of data anywhere. People kept adding to the soup.”
“You could ask a million different questions,” he added before teams started to present findings Sunday on everything from the number of organizations that apply for various grants and get nothing, to the geographic spread of government grants and the big 10 organizations who get most government grants.
Kalpana Singh, a University of Alberta post-doctoral fellow, got the biggest applause for showing the group how to pull data out of hundreds of pages of clunky PDF documents from one funding agency.
“Just a half an hour task,” said Singh with a laugh. Her day job involved designing a camera for a Nobel-prize winning neutrino detector in Sudbury.
Jackson worked mapping the level of interconnectedness between non-profits, which is a measure of resiliency. He graphed how many people sit on more than one board in a community. Fort McMurray really suffered from a lack of interconnection after the fire, he said.
If they’d seen this data before hand, the sector could have seen its weakness and prepared.
Data for Good Edmonton’s bank now includes data from the Canada Revenue Agency, Edmonton Community Foundation grant applications, United Way outcomes reports, City of Edmonton and 211 calls, said Alex Draper, who helped organize the event with the community foundation.
The team was also trying to see how a disaster like the Fort McMurray fire and Calgary floods changed the pattern of calls coming to 211, said Draper, and trying to see whether the demand seen through 211 calls aligned with where the funding was going.
The findings will be reviewed to add context, then shared with all 10,000 not-for-profits in Alberta, plus sister organizations to the Edmonton Community Foundation.
The new Slack channel or online discussion group will also continue, offering not-for-profit groups a way to reconnect with data analysts when they have specific questions.
Data For Good Edmonton will be working with partners to further refine which questions need to be worked on next before the group reconvenes.
No one has this collection of data anywhere. People kept adding to the soup.