Interview: Jake Porway on collaborating with data

Sarah Brooks ( Bio  /   Posts )  |  Tuesday, January 24, 2012 UTC

2011 Social Innovation Fellow Jake Porway wants to live in a world where every social impact organization thinks deeply about their data. As a result, Porway founded Data Without Borders to explore how data scientists can help solve social, environmental, and community problems alongside nonprofits and NGOs. His inspiration for founding the organization came after attending a hackathon where he thought, "Instead of just figuring out how to build another restaurant review app., can't we figure out how to help feed people?"


To test that hypothesis, Data Without Borders held two weekend-long data dives during 2011. Their first event in New York last fall brought sixty data scientists together with NYCLU, UN Global Pulse and Mix Market. They dove into those organizations' existing data sets to understand what questions the data could answer, and how to best frame those questions, understand the variables, and account for the missing values. Out of the sessions, one group said they "saved a year’s worth of work," and another group formed an ongoing collaboration with the UN Global Pulse project in which their work was shown in a presentation to the UN General Assembly. You can read about the exciting results from both data dives in more detail.

Based on the success of the data dives, Data Without Borders is planning to launch DWB DataCorps early this year to build a vast network of data scientists that can work internationally, have sustained engagements, and bring lasting change to organizations that don't have data resources. The program will recruit volunteer fellows who can work on projects part-time over the weekends, nights or on their own schedules. If you're interested in helping, you can sign up on Data Without Border's volunteer page. 

Recently, we checked in with Porway to learn how his experience at PopTech shaped his current work with Data Without Borders.

PopTech: As a Social Innovation Fellow, what was your biggest takeaway from last year's PopTech conference?
Jake Porway: I walked away completely inspired by the realization that collaborations can't just happen between two organizations anymore. It has to be this multi-faceted collaboration between different groups with different skills. I have to admit, I naively walked into Data Without Borders thinking, “We've got this. We'll take the social sector, bring data scientists to it, we'll solve their data problems.” Almost immediately in working with these groups we found this data insight led to needing a tool. We realized that we need developers, designers, policy makers, and government.

And where does the social sector fit into the mix?
It became clear that the solution isn't just data and the social sector. It's everyone that has something to contribute to uniting around this idea, or whatever common cause we're addressing. It dawned on me that we're at a stage where we no longer need to have these monolithic groups that just meet up together in pay areas, but you can take a little bit from each group and bring them together to make these dream teams that can really solve problems.

How has this informed your long-term thinking about Data Without Borders?
We want to get this three-pronged approach together; with governments that have the data and don't know who cares about it or what to do with it, the social sector who wants to help the world somehow but doesn't have the data, and the data scientists who know what to do with the data but don't necessarily know how it should be applied. Multi-party broad collaborations just blew me away at PopTech.

This interview was edited and condensed.

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