Autumn DataDive

You are invited to take part in our next DataDive on Saturday, Sep 24th and Sunday, Sep 25th, in London! We would be thrilled to have you spend the day with us, donating your time, skills, and energy to help two fantastic data for good projects.

DataKind UK is a charity that solves tough social challenges through data science. We help social sector organisations benefit from advances in data science so they can make better decisions and have greater social impact.

This DataDive is kindly sponsored by Sage Publishing. The two organisations taking part are WeFarm and One World.

WeFarm is a social enterprise that works to solve a problem faced by the majority of the world’s 500 million small-scale farmers: that they do not have an easy way to access actionable, relevant, and timely information. They have developed a peer-to-peer SMS service for the 500 million small-scale farmers around the world with no access to the internet, and are looking for help analysing this free text SMS data.

One World is an international NGO focused on innovating with internet and mobile phone applications that the world's poorest people can use to improve their life chances, and that help people everywhere understand and act on global problems. One aspect of their work focuses on election monitoring in West Africa where local observers are trained to report back on polling station administration during election day. We will be helping them find insight in this citizen generated data.

Please select the ticket category that best represents your skills.

• Data Scientist: you rock statistical analysis, and are comfortable using R, Python, Matlab, or other common data analysis tools.
• Text Analysis Specialist: you laugh in the face of free text! Keyword parsing, n-gram analysis, NLP - it's all in a day's work for you.
• Data Viz Whizz: you can whip up a pretty visualisation in no time and bring the wow factor to everything you do.
• Developer: you are comfortable coding in various languages and can build things that machines can use to get things done.
• Data Enthusiast: the idea of data gets you hot and bothered, but you don't yet have all the right skills.

Below is an outline of the schedule for the weekend, with specific details included for each day. Participants are encouraged to attend the whole event.

Please read the schedule over carefully so that you understand how things will operate during the weekend. And as always, please let us know if you have any questions: contact@datakind.org.uk

Remember, you need to bring your own hardware and software, your data skills, and the belief that you can help change the world for the better.

Schedule

Saturday, Sep 24th

• 9:30 AM: Doors open, sign-in and breakfast
• 10:00 AM: Presentation from charities
  
• 11:00AM: Divide into teams and get cracking!
• 1:00 PM: Lunch
• 7:00 PM: Dinner
• 10:00 PM: Everybody goes home for the night

We will start with presentations from the organisations taking part. You will learn more about each project and choose which organisation they'd like to work with. We then form teams around their individual project questions. Each organisation will have Data Ambassadors assigned to them who will help advise on and manage the projects throughout the day. We'll have meals and keep the space open until 10:00PM for the late-night divers.

Sunday, Sep 25th

• 9:30 AM: Doors open, breakfast
• 1:00 PM: Presentations from teams
  
• 2:30 PM: Another successful DataDive in the books!

This is your chance to show the charities what you have done with their data! Finish off the work you started the day before and get ready to tell the room what you found. There is no expectation of slides or other presentation materials, simply use whatever method of conveying your work to the organisations you feel is best. This is also the chance for the organisations to ask you questions about how and why you did what you did. These presentations can be single or group work, but they can be no longer than 10 minutes each. We want to give everyone a chance to speak, and get people out at a reasonable time.

Other items of note for the weekend

• Data will be shared on USB sticks. There is a Github repository setup to use for sharing code, data, and analyses during the event. The repository is located at: https://github.com/DataKind-UK. We will use hackpad for capturing work done at the DataDive, so please use it for sharing and collaboration.
• We do not assign you to a charity. We want you to work with the organisation and data you feel most passionate about, so come with an open mind and be ready to learn.
• You do not have to stay the entire weekend to participate in the event. We hope that you will find a project you can dig into, but you are always welcome to come and go as you please.
• You do not have to work with the same organisation for the whole weekend. Again, we hope that you will find a project to work on to completion, but if at any point you feel like you want to change simply let the Ambassador from those teams know.
• We do not provide any hardware or software for you to use. We'll have the data and some services setup (wiki, DropBox, Github), but otherwise you should bring your own laptop and come ready to use whatever data tools you like.

This event is kindly sponsored by Sage Publishing.