Welcome to NYC School of Data — a community conference that demystifies the policies and practices around civic data, technology, and service design. This year’s conference concludes NYC’s annual Open Data Week & features 60+ sessions organized by NYC’s civic technology, data, and design community! Our conversations & workshops will feed your mind and empower you to improve your neighborhood. Follow the conversation #nycSOdata on twitter and tune into our live stream (provided by the Internet Society New York Chapter).
To attend, you need to purchase tickets via eventbrite. Venue is fully accessible and content is all ages friendly — free, professional on-site childcare is provided for ALL participants! If you have accessibility questions or needs, please email us at < schoolofdata@beta.nyc >.
While they can provide useful insights, demographic information (i.e., race, gender, income) has an unfortunate history of being poorly utilized in research and analytics. The results of this misuse can have unseen yet grave consequences for the vulnerable populations whom said data is collected on.
This workshop will discuss the ways in which an over-reliance on demographic information can inhibit in-depth examinations of existing data at the expense of more effective and interesting research questions. We will critically examine how demographic information is measured, discuss more productive means of assessing individual characteristics, and weigh the risks and benefits of including demographics information in analyses.
In an effort to leave attendees empowered to apply this knowledge to their own work, we will walk through real world examples of implementing these practices in organizations, especially by those with limited decision making abilities. Finally, we will engage in a brief practical exercise in which we will abandon the use of demographic information and generate more fruitful research questions from a sample dataset.
