Connecting data users

What's the need?

• Data users, even when living in the same region, are often separated. Users may be facing similar problems and may have solutions or complementary expertise to share.

• Together, data users can be stronger advocates for social change, for improving civic data, for making additional data available, and for the creation of tools to make data more useful.

• In-person connections can be fun and help strengthen local networks.

Why the library?

• Your library is already a space for convening and connecting individuals to information.

• Your library has the infrastructure and skills to build community around civic data.

What you can do:

• Attend or host a civic data community event like a Data Day or a coding challenge

• Promote civic data initiatives through the library's social media, events, and calendars

• Facilitate a local data user group around a specific dataset or topic (ex. housing data, environmental data)

• Host recurring data literacy trainings and workshops

Inspiration:

• Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh's Data Day: Using Civic Data to Spark Hands-on Community Engagement

• New York, NY: NYC Open Data Event Calendar

• Chapel Hill, NC: Chapel Hill Public Library's Open Data Hackathon

• Ottawa, ON: Open Data Ottawa's Open Data Book Club

• Cleveland, OH: Data Days Cleveland

• Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Data Day

Resources you can use:

• Detroit Digital Justice Coalition: Discovering Technology ("DiscoTech"): From that page, see the "How to DiscoTech" zine for detailed principles and specific guidance!

• Roadmap to Informed Communities / Sunlight Foundation. “Community Data Dialogues: Learn how to host events to engage non-technical audiences on open data”

• Murray, Brittany, Elsa Falkenburger, and Priya Saxena. “Data Walks: An Innovative Way to Share Data with Communities.” Urban Institute, June 4, 2016.

• Schlosser, Dan. “When ‘Awesome’ Is Isolating: Making Hackathons Accessible.”