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Just Data Research Matters The Deep WIth

Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: Prompt 6 – Infrastructural inversion

In their seminal book on classifications and infrastructures, Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star conclude: We have argued in this book that it is politically and ethically crucial to recognize the vital role of infrastructure in the “built moral environment.” Seemingly purely technical issues like how to name […]

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Just Data New Learning The Deep WIth

Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: Prompt 5 – Epistemic (In)justice

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells a number of stories that challenge the ways Western science constructs knowledge, and therefore understands nature. In one example, she discusses the ways trees help and communicate with each other through symbiotic mycelia. Because experts study individual trees, or via Darwinism, competition for survival/reproduction, it was impossible for […]

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Just Data New Learning Research Matters The Deep WIth

Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: Prompt 4 – Systems Analysis

Data systems in non-profits are nearly always built to track, manage, and analyze individual clients/service users. In fact, this is a base assumption of such systems, and the vast majority of the literature on the topic supports this assumption. The problem with tracking service users.. well, there’s a lot. Here’s a few: We need not […]

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Just Data New Learning The Deep WIth

Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: Prompt 3 – Participatory research, evaluation and design

Of the 5 prompts for Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits, Participatory (Action) Research, Evaluation, and Design is the approach I’ve already advocated for the most. In my most recent paper, we suggested that an opportunity for approaching data work in non-profits involves trying to “Build ways for youths and frontline staff to help create […]

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Just Data New Learning The Deep WIth

Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: Prompt 2 – Data Collaboratives

This posts belongs to a series, Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: First steps toward practice, in which I’m developing 5 prompts for orienting non-profit discussions about data work that can be organized toward justice. Each prompt is meant to provoke and ground ideas for organizational change that would include transformations in data work. The […]

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Just Data New Learning The Deep WIth

Conceptualizing Better Data Work in Non-profits: Prompt 1 – The Reggio Emilia Approach

This is the second in a blog post series, the introduction to which is: Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: First steps toward practice. Reggio Emilia is an approach to democratic education that originated in preschools in Italy and is now used around the world in schools across age ranges. It’s worthy of some closer […]

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Just Data New Learning The Deep WIth

Conceptualizing better data work in non-profits: First steps toward practice

In the last couple years, I’ve published 3 articles regarding the use of data in non-profit organizations. As I see it now, I’ve accomplished 2 out of 3 goals I had when I started this work many years ago as a dissertation project. Each of these stages has been a serious challenge for me. The […]

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Just Data The Deep WIth

If you want tech to harm less, call yourself a Luddite

Apparently Luddism is making a comeback. Ted Chiang just wrote about it in The New Yorker (Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey), Angela Watercutter on the writer’s guild strike at Wired, and Cory Doctorow on sci-fi as a Luddite literature (and back in February). Of course, it’s been here and there discussed for years (What […]

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Just Data The Deep WIth

To Grow Participation, Relinquish Power

Real power. The power to make decisions. For 15 years, I’ve described the work I do as youth community organizing, or youth participatory democracy. The idea at first was to get young people more involved in the public sphere, some ideal of more democratic governance and activist young people. Increasingly, it has become crystal clear […]

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Just Data Research Matters

Algorithmic helping

Whether self-help or helping profession, the act of improving the human and their well-being will become increasingly relegated to the efforts of algorithms. ChatGPT and its siblings are merely the latest and most visible actors in this game. The use of robots to provide physical help and company to the elderly, apps that surveil and […]