78 karma · joined September 19, 2022
I took a step back from the project for a few months, not having time to volunteer. My understanding is that the board was basically formed out of all the people remaining after some enthusiasm died down.
When I came back, the board had incorporated and applied for 501c3 status. There were four board members, and a few volunteers who mostly just helped talk through the massive problem and plan. Eventually Kristin (OP) stepped down from the board, but was still at some meetings. A rotating cast of 2-3 other people would be hanging around the meetings at any given time.
I became Director of Operations on a volunteer basis for a bit over a year. This mostly just means paying bills, knowing passwords, and updating the website.
We had weekly meetings, where we'd talk for a few minutes or hours about the project, our ideas, and what we could do to move things forward. [0]
We ran a data bounty during this time [1]. One volunteer, Eric, made a bunch of prototypes around metadata for data sources.
Then we got 501c3 status after waiting for almost a year. I quit my day job and started writing grants and set up online donations. I hired two contractors for a bit of grant writing help, but otherwise did not have "coworkers" or "co-volunteers".
We got the grant money [2] about 8 months later. I went looking for a full-time software engineer. I started getting a salary and working full-time on the project as Executive Director, doing all the non-technical design, planning, and product work.
Throughout, I spent a lot of time interviewing and doing design research: investigating the work being done journalists, transparency activists, and local data users in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere). I've also been collecting feedback and experience from everyone in the Discord. Most of our current ideas about what's important and where to start come from that work, and the recent addition of an engineer with excellent journalism and software experience (about 6 weeks ago) has allowed us to start prototyping and developing something together in earnest.
Now: We're excited about our strategies, and it's probably a little early for broad consumption. We didn't coordinate this post; everything you can see is a work in progress. There's lively discussion in Discord about our goals, and I've been typing for about 24 hours straight with a break to nap and a break to eat something.
[0]: https://docs.pdap.io/updates/working-sessions [1]: https://docs.pdap.io/updates/blog/7-14-21-bounty-retro [2]: https://docs.pdap.io/updates/blog/5-17-22-first-grant-awarde...
That said, if you head to https://pdap.io you’ll find the most concrete explanation we have. It still needs to be clearer, but it’s more specific than the docs.
Most of our scrapers are written by inexperienced volunteers so this is probably still quite valuable as is. If it works, we’ll take it.
You could also raise a hand as a human data source; perhaps one day someone will be looking for jail data from these counties and you could offer up some way to contact you. I gave my contact info to the person you replied to. Use it if you want!
Could you share what you’ve made somehow? josh.chamberlain@pdap.io or discord are likely the best way.
Would also be curious to hear what made you take this on.
Measures for Justice is working on developing standards: https://measuresforjustice.org/
When you say “I know what those people are capable of” do you mean something as ominous as that sounds?
I’d like to aim higher than a quotable statistic for a politician, in any case :)
That said, we still have work to do pointing people in this direction and helping them understand why. This whole thread is going to really affect our website and docs :)
1. Agreed. Our strategy for this isn’t clear on the website, I guess, but we do have one. It’s to focus on depth in geographic areas. This is because context is critical, and because most of the users we talk to are operating locally with municipal or county level data. So it’s more important to have every data source we can possibly find relevant to Pittsburgh than it is to have every arrest record in every municipality. Or at least, it’s more immediately useful to people.
That said, most people seem to contribute data sources from where they live. I think little microcosms will spring up where people take stewardship of maintaining information about their chosen geo or subject areas. Not too far down the roadmap, Milestone 2 for the PDAP heads.
2. I will take it as a next step to make this strategy clear and say why. We want to basically allow the community to make its own to do list: what kind of question are you trying to answer? That creates a “bounty” for data which can be fulfilled by an altruistic volunteer, another member of your team, etc.
3. Yes. We’re not trying to do apples to apples comparisons of departments yet, partly because it’s so absurdly difficult and you don’t know where to start. Why would you undertake a 12 hour research project to compare St. Louis and Minneapolis incident reports if you don’t have a use case? Instead we’re focusing on what we DO know we need: complete local data, town by town / county by county.
The data we collected reflects the nature of our early experiments, which were scattered. This airtable prototype is maybe 2 weeks old, next up is helping people understand where to focus.
The idea for demonstrating value is also local. I’m working with groups in Pittsburgh (where we are based, and where our funding came from) to make ourselves indispensable to them. I’m hoping to turn the $250k into a handful of killer local case studies in this year, rather than marking 0.1% progress toward a national vision.
Thanks again for giving me the practice explaining this stuff. I hope I’m making any kind of sense, and of course happy to hear where I’m still wrong.
We've come a long way since that post in terms of strategy and focus. Most of that time was spent with between 1 and 3 volunteers, working a couple hours a week.
Transparency is a good goal in itself, I think. People are already using this public data, we're just trying to make it more accessible.
"Policing the police" was the original phrase used on reddit, but if you look at our website (https://pdap.io), that's not a phrase we use.
We've only had paid staff for about 6 weeks. We've run several experiments and started from scratch a few times over the years. We've been slowly inching the project forward in our spare time; I was the only volunteer for much of that time, and I can't even code!
1. Sounds great, we're building something like this.
2. Even making a list of police departments is a big challenge. We've made a good start but have work to do.
3. Yep, soon we'll have something to query.
"Making public information public" is a good tagline too.
Do you know what kinds of work people did with the data? It seems to me one of the best ways to address BART crime would be to support the impoverished and desperate people who don't have any recovery or mental health support, but that work is slow...
2. You can run them locally. We're not running the scrapers anywhere, or storing extractions anywhere.
3. This is a big, big question. Right now, the answer is dependent on the use case. Rather than trying to make the world's biggest database, we're going to respond to community needs and build this kind of thing as it comes up.
4. https://measuresforjustice.org/ is doing something like this! We're interested in creating incentives for police departments to make their data more accessible and transparent.