GIT Community Data Works

The grant supported and amplified community engagement between DataWorks and local community-based organizations. More specifically, the grant provided funding that enabled community-based organizations to work with DataWorks free of charge, and by doing so, increase their capacities to use data and to do so in responsible ways. We accomplished our objectives of working with multiple community-based organizations to facilitate and amplify their use of data, and through that, create processes for responsible data use. In doing so, we realized that the processes were more beneficial and impactful for the data workers than the community-based organizations. This is a change from our proposal, which focused on creating tools for community-based organizations. This change arose in response to the working conditions for the community-based organizations we partnered with. They relied upon volunteers whose availability and commitment understandably fluctuated, and their data practices and capacities varied widely, even within an organization. Introducing standards and procedures into their already hectic workflow would have been unsuccessful and unreasonable. However, preparing and enabling the data workers to lead in responsible data use and proactively shape the relationship with the community-based organizations as clients requesting data work was successful and fair. In doing so, the workers' data literacy and leadership capacities increased, and collectively, we modeled a data work environment that heightens the status of the workers by developing and acknowledging their broad expertise.