Our Community in 2020
By: Datakind Uk
Tags: Data Science, Chapter Leader, Charity, News

A virtual pub quiz during the summer

DataKind UK is able to help so many organisations thanks to its fantastic community of volunteer data scientists. We’re so grateful to every single person who has helped at an event, wrangled some data, or otherwise contributed their time and expertise this year. THANK YOU!

Leading this community are our wonderful Chapter Leaders. They made the outstanding commitment to run various elements of our work — and keep us going throughout the pandemic. Below, they tell us a bit about what their committees have achieved this year in spite of the 2020-ness of it all. They are all superstars!

Lindsey Munroe

Community Committee

Chapter Lead — Lindsey Munroe

ComCom’s purpose is to sustain an active and diverse community of volunteers. We kicked off the year with a series of workshops to write a ‘Code of Conduct’ that will foster an open and inclusive atmosphere at our events. This has now been introduced into DataDive weekends.

We also held our first ever Data Ambassador Open evening, back in April. We had 80 potential volunteers join that event. It was an opportunity for them to find out more about the role and talk to previous Ambassadors about their experience. We held the event again in September and had 50 attendees!

On top of that, we conducted 36 Data Ambassador interviews interviews from June to November! One of our committee members created a standard interview rubric to improve our interview process. Finally, we have started developing Diversity & Inclusion training for Data Ambassadors, a project that will continue into next year.

Next year, we would like to see more cross-committee activities and projects. We’re also going to build on the Code of Conduct and Diversity & Inclusion training to create a more welcoming and inclusive DataKind!

Antonio Campello

Scoping and Impact Committee

Chapter Lead — Antonio Campello

In numbers: we have discussed 14 large projects this year. This includes four DataCorps and eight DataDives.

In 2020, we continued to improve the data maturity assessment that we undertake with every charity we partner with. We now have a comparable quantitative score (the data maturity score) for each charity we engage with. This allows us to draw a picture of how mature are the charities we work with in terms of key themes such as Skills, Leadership, and Tools. And crucially, it helps us understand how we can be most useful to the charity, in terms of improving their data maturity. We’ve written up this process, and will be publishing our ‘Journey to Impact’ guide in the new year. Another big win of 2020 was the incorporation into our assessment process of specific questions on ethics, bias, and unintended consequences, designed by the Ethics committee.

Full impact assessments of this year’s DataDive projects are still underway (to give charities time to embed changes following their projects, we assess impact 3 to 4 months after a project is concluded), but we did collect some anecdotal evidence of impact. For instance, Citizens Advice Manchester hired two data-related roles following their DataDive, and Citizens Advice Lewisham presented the findings of their DataDive to the Mayor of Lewisham, who was extremely impressed and keen to use the data to support the council’s priorities.

Charlie Harrison

Office Hours

Chapter Lead — Charlie Harrison

Office Hours is a light-touch, short consultation service for social change organisations. It serves as the first point of contact with DataKind UK for most charities. We provide 1-hour sessions, mostly on the first Wednesday of the month. We have seamlessly moved online since the pandemic began and are considering adding extra, off-schedule or lunchtime sessions to accommodate more charities next year.

We have 20 active volunteers, which is plenty of capacity for the current level of sign-ups. As well as providing the service, we have quarterly meetings for all office hours volunteers, and aim to provide regular training to members on topics like ethics and theory of change.

This year, we helped over 50 charities with advice and guidance. We started a new Scotland-focused service based in Edinburgh, where an excellent team of volunteers is now nationally available thanks to Zoom.

Next year I’d like Office Hours to work more closely with the other committees to make the most of the data we’ve collected, and to improve our core documentation, capturing the soft skills and specific knowledge that we’ve acquired and found useful. And of course, I hope that Office Hours can continue to provide excellent, accessible support for all charities that request it.

Ruby Childs

Ethics Committee

Chapter Lead — Ruby Childs

Well, what a year 2020 has been. We’ve certainly taken it all within our stride as a nation, individuals, and on a global scale. Although a year of discombobulation, we continued to thrive as an Ethics committee within DataKind. Our book club moved to an online platform as did most of the world, but this enabled us to open our doors beyond the UK. As a result, our book club saw participants in Asia and America and allowed us to have a globally based discussion around ethics, providing us with a wealth of cultural insights and ethical challenges we may have not obtained otherwise. We led sessions on Addictive Tech, AI at Work, and even Medicine and AI, being some of the most pressingly relevant topics of 2020.

Additionally, we stepped up our efforts in training, led by members Stef and Laura, ensuring our Data Science community is prepared and aware of ethical considerations both within the workplace and with the work we do at DataKind.

We also held our first Ethics DataDive, led by Michelle, a single day delving into and assessing the tools across responsible and fair AI. This was a particular highlight and the team has been working hard in delivering its results — more to come in 2021.

As 2020 ends, we look forward to a brighter future, and the joy of hopefully all meeting in person, yet we are also aware of what 2020 has provided us, time to reflect, learn and form new processes. In many ways 2020 has allowed us to become a world without borders.

Vincent Delorme

Programmes Committee

Chapter Lead — Vincent Delorme

The Programmes committee is responsible for improving the services we offer to organisations. We do this by making changes to the way we run existing programmes, like DataDives, to make them run more efficiently, or by investigating potential new programmes that would bring DataKind UK closer to fulfilling its mission.

In the past, we have focused on documenting existing processes and made sure our programmes and internal processes were GDPR-compliant.

This year, we focused on two projects. The first was to increase the security of the data being shared by a social change organisation during DataDives. We investigated the use of virtual machines, and created a process to help organisations share their data more securely with volunteers.

We also looked at how to provide better tools for project management during DataCorps. We created a Project Health checklist for the volunteer Project Manager, to help them flag potential issues in the project early on.

These projects were rolled out and tested during the last few DataDives and DataCorps projects of the year, and we’re looking forward to improving them further next year using feedback from those projects!