Data Guides for Data: Beyond Metadata

This presentation was part of the NNIP Showcase, Part 2 session at the October 2018 NNIP Partners’ Meeting.

In May 2018, NNIP partnered with the Microsoft Cities Team to launch Catalyzing Community Criminal Justice Reform with Data, a cross-site project to better understand the local criminal justice data and advocacy landscape and encourage more local data organizations to bring their talents to bear on these issues.  In Summer 2018, NNIP conducted a survey of Partners to learn about criminal justice related data, projects, and relationships.  NNIP will publish a fact sheet in the next few weeks summarizing the results and is now exploring options for an in-depth quantitative analysis on one aspect of criminal justice reform in a specific city.This showcase provides a lightning-quick overview for a few interesting projects we uncovered through the survey.

People need to understand the context of civic data if they are to use it appropriately and reveal its full value. Without proper context, data users are ill-equipped to identify quality constraints, uncertainties, limitations, biases, and potential privacy and ethical issues that can cloud the use of civic administrative data. There is no widely-adopted framework for capturing contextual information about administrative civic data, but the Regional Data Center’s Data Guides (inspired by previous work in Chicago and at the Urban Institute) are one way to try to collect and share important context for data users.