Increasingly non-profits, community organizations, civic startups and cities are integrating data into their decision making process and this data is setting priorities, increasing transparency and identifying focus areas for innovation. Some recent examples of this include the city’s recent HubHacks event focused on data visualizations that the city will use in its decision-making, as well as the Boston Foundation’s Indicators Project.
As citizens begin to grapple with the information that is being collected, aggregated and used to generate new insights, questions are starting to emerge:
- How do we decide what data to use?
- Is this the right data to answer our questions?
- Is this data set complete?
- How can we combine diverse data set to reveal new insights?
- Are the right people involved in the data aggregation or analysis?
- How do we notify citizens of the use of their data?
Join us and The Venture Café for a conversation on Civic Tech on June 10, 2015, 5:30PM – 7:30PM at Microsoft New England (NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge). Together, we’ll discuss this emerging set of questions and consider the impact of data on our neighborhoods.
Speakers:
- Holly St. Clair, Metropolitan Area Planning Council
- Elsa Sze, Agora
- Chris Horne, Sasaki Associates
- Greg Lipstein, DrivenData
Schedule:
5:30 – 6 PM – Registration and networking
6:00 – 6:45 – Short Intro followed by short presentations by each of our speakers
6:45 – 7:30 – Breakout into small discussion groups
7:30 – 7:45 – Group readouts
7:45 – 9:30 – Post event networking
We encourage all who attend to join the conversation on Twitter using #CivicTechBOS. Register today at this link.