The Public Interest Data Lab is intended to provide data science experience to students in service of the public interest. We have three goals:

• Make progress on a project that advances the public interest or social justice in collaboration with a community partner. And have a project you can point to at the end, an example of your work.
• Practice working with real data to answer real questions with attention to the moral and ethical implications of our work. This includes finding data, exploring and cleaning data, analyzing and modeling data, and visualizing and communicating data and doing so with care and humility and respect for the affected partners and communities.
• Develop experience working on a data science team, including processes for working collaboratively, openly, inclusively, and reproducibly.

Spring 2020 Project

Our spring 2020 partner is the Charlottesville Department of Social Services (CDSS) who wish to understand more about (1) the sources of referral disproportionality and (2) repeat referrals. This year’s work builds on the work from the prior to years on racial disproportionality and disparity in child welfare and foster care, addressing new questions prompted by that work and deepening our understanding. CDSS will use the results to determine what changes in practice will help minimize inequity.

• Expectations and Evaluations
• Schedule and Reading
• Resources
• Batten School Policies

People

Michele Claibourn	Charlotte McClintock	Brian Kim
Instructor, PI	Project Manager, R Guru	Project Advisor
mclaibourn [at] virginia [dot] edu	ccm9yd [at] virginia [dot] edu	bhk5fs [at] virginia [dot] edu
Via Slack or Zoom, by appt.	Via Slack or Zoom, tbd	Via Slack or Zoom, tbd

Find us on Slack or send us an email!