Last Friday, I went to an event called Data for Good, hosted by Washington University's Olin Business School. Here are a few notes from the event...
The most interesting new thing I heard was about the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative. In short: a group of people started working on a web portal at OpenSTL's 2017 hackathon to use data posted publicly by the city of St. Louis. They did this without permission—my kind of people—using data that was there, then provided the useful results to the city. There's a better description here from STLPR: Vacancy Portal opens door to data on abandoned parcels in St. Louis. Of course, the thing itself is interesting, but even more interesting is the thought that comes with it: there are opportunities to do useful work just laying around out there waiting to be discovered, and you don't have to be picked to do the work—you just decide to do the work. (See also: Seth Godin's latest Akimbo podcast: You're It.)
(More: OpenSTL has a Meetup group. They're still working on the project. Even tomorrow (2018-10-13).)
In the next panel, someone—I think it was Philip Bane of the Smart Cities Council—referred to wicked problems in designing solutions to social problems. Wicked problems are one of those terms that get thrown about without much thought. The term originates here, in a paper you should read if you care at all about solving difficult, intertwined, impossible-to-optimize-for-everything problems: Rittel, Horst W. J.; Webber, Melvin M. (1973). "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning". Policy Sciences. 4: 155–169. (doi: 10.1007/bf01405730, pdf). The thing deserves its own post. In the meantime, here are some notes about it.
At the end of the day, Jake Porway of DataKind gave the keynote presentation. Here are a few recommended resources from his talk:
- A book, Raw Data is an Oxymoron
- A research institute, Data & Society
- An organization, The Engine Room