 Hi. Welcome. I am from Data to Policy Project. So I work out of the Araria Library, which is in Denver, Colorado. We are a sort of central campus in downtown that serves three institutions. So we have two universities, one community college on campus. And the Araria Library provides services for all three of those schools. We do research support services, institutional repository stuff, data management, visualization, GIS trainings for students and faculty. So that's kind of how we ended up creating this project. And the project I'm going to talk about is the Data to Policy Project. So essentially what happened is 2016 we have two shootings of black men by police officers within a couple of days. This is after a lot of attention has been raised about this because of information actually getting out on the internet and on YouTube. Basically because this is a central campus with a really diverse student population because of the multiple institutions there was an event where students could kind of talk about it and talk through their feelings, kind of create a community where students could talk to each other and what came out of it is that a lot of students wanted to do something and they had no idea what to do. They had no idea how to go about creating change. They didn't know where to look. They didn't know what the tools were. And so out of that was born this idea of kind of finding a way to bring the tools to students and show them the action steps that they could take to create change in their own communities and really, sorry, expose them to those things, empower them to use them, give them an opportunity to try it out so that they could go out in the world and actually do this themselves. It was originally planned to be an independent study so that it could be super flexible and we realized right away that that put a lot of limitations on who would be able to be involved in the project and so it went a different direction integrating into courses which creates its own issues which I will get to. And we started with the focus on policing and crime obviously because of the inspiration. We added affordable housing because of students sort of requesting that that be a part of it. I don't know how much people know about Denver. We're going through aggressive gentrification in the last 10 years so a lot of students were asking if they could do projects around that so we've added that into. So the project framework is essentially there's the two subject tracks and what we do is we sort of provide guidance, provide these sort of track instructions for students. We provide rubrics to instructors who then are able to incorporate it into their existing curriculums and make it work with whatever their subject matter is and how much time they have. We also have a website where we have program information that's sort of a center for the students who are taking part in it. We provide the data sets there and then resources related to equity, the local community, questions the community has and how to present your work so things like having a template for a professional scientific poster and then the data to policy team sort of curates and compiles the data from a lot of different resources. We use entirely open data for this but it's being given to students who don't necessarily have expertise so we make sure to curate it, have it be accessible and that's all on our website and then it ends with a symposium where students are presenting their work, the projects that they did, the research, their policy recommendations to their professors but also to people in the community. We invite organizations, we've tried to invite local government representatives with differing levels of success but giving them an opportunity to actually connect with people who can make these ideas happen and then we've also added a midpoint equity discussion because students were not really getting to think about that until the end when we got to the symposium and the panel discussion and so we've added one in the middle so that students can really think about framing their policy recommendations with sort of equity local community considerations sort of from the beginning. So benefits to the program specifically for math based courses it's connecting a lot of the work that students are doing to tangible outcomes and impacts rather than just using data sets that are prepped for a certain outcome in your statistical model really understanding what that means, what the numbers you're getting mean, what the potential impacts of your analysis can be, understanding equity and social justice. A lot of the students that are in the more quantitative classes have never really had to think about that especially not in terms of their own class work and how it is a factor in the work that they're doing as well and then understanding how to use data and the things that they already know how to do in order to address social issues that they maybe don't know that they have any power to influence or know how to approach and then for these more social science courses it's obviously promotion of data literacy, understanding that data is imperfect so really specifically what we focus on is that data that they're going to be using is incomplete because of the way that it's collected and because the prioritization of what data is collected is influenced by the people who are doing the research or in the government and asking for it and so it is influenced by human bias and that is not something that a lot of social science students have ever had to think about and so really understanding that it's a whole system and grounding their outcomes in data analysis so any sort of program or policy outcomes that social science students are thinking about understanding that those should be grounded in data to be effective and then how to also use data to evaluate their effectiveness after the fact and sort of have it be a cyclical process and then for all students it really grounds their academic experience in local community issues especially being a campus that's downtown being connected to the community in Denver is really important and it really breaks down the isolation of just being in an academic world when you're doing your work while you're in the middle of a city that's going through a lot of change so it really is an opportunity for them to understand where they are and how they can influence their space it's obviously a huge opportunity for interdisciplinary coursework we're working on pairing classes doing one quantitative one qualitative class together so that students can support each other and then familiarity with open and real data has been a big one even students that are comfortable using data or comfortable doing statistical analysis have never had to deal with real data sets and incomplete data sets and the messy way that they're presented and having to deal with cleaning data and so that's been a huge thing that they now understand how to use all of these skills that they were learning in the real world to do real work with the kind of data that they'll probably be receiving and then the community response has been really good it's been slowly building up we're just going into our second year participation in this has helped a lot of participating organizations think about the work that they're doing in a new way there's a lot of organizations or government agencies that have not really thought about implementing this kind of process into what they're doing it's kind of more of an intuitive decision-making specifically the araria police department so our campus police department has been super involved and come to a lot of the symposiums and has really rethought the way that they're developing their programs has tried to recruit students to come and help them do some data analysis to make better decisions about how they approach the work that they're doing on campus which is not something that they necessarily had the resources to do and now they know where to turn and like how they can get students involved in helping them do that it creates connections for students and for our local community organizations so hopefully not only getting students more involved in a lot of these organizations that they might care about that are related to the projects that they're working on but also supporting the organizations we're very careful to make sure that it's a supportive relationship and not an exploitative relationship in that anybody who works with this project is getting something out of it that there's research that they couldn't do that they're getting done now all right so i'm gonna go quickly now i've taken too long working challenges working with municipal data is really hard it's really messy availability of local data is super varied between different municipalities because it's dictated by what people in the government decide is important to collect so there's a lot of holes there's a lot of stuff that's not there that provides a big opportunity for students to identify those holes and incorporate it in their projects but it definitely makes it harder we also have to curate it because there's such a range of experience with students making sure that there's stuff that people who've never looked at this before can use that's really simple for them to use and making sure that there's stuff that's a little more challenging for some of the more advanced students integrating it into courses is its own thing we try to provide a lot of support for faculty making sure that it can work with their curriculum making sure that we are supported recognizing that the faculty is usually in a position where they have expertise in one area and we're asking them to introduce something that they're not necessarily familiar with so making sure we have the tools and the support of the trainings to help them walk students through either the statistical analysis or the policy side whichever they're less familiar with so i'm going to go through this quickly now developing equitable policy has been a huge problem especially in the early stages when it was a lot of math classes and a lot of students that had never thought about equity in their work at all we were getting a lot of weird policy suggestions and realized that we had to provide that framework and that scaffolding for people to understand the history of the social conditions in the community of the policy that existed of the influence that that policy had on the different communities so that they could have a better understanding of how to use these tools to address those issues and not sort of work in a vacuum of we found this and we think this and now we think that more people should get married and figuring out what policy current currently exists was a really big one a lot of people were sort of guessing at policy and we realized we really need to make sure that we have an easy way for them to look at it and that's a really specific language to learn and a lot of these students have never looked at an actual like local municipal policy before so creating buy-in is really important kind of what we talked about before making sure that communities understand that this is beneficial to them and not just a benefit to the students making sure that instructors understand that we will support them and that this can add an extra layer to the things that they're already doing rather than just being a burden on changing the way that they're teaching classes a tangible application of their skills hopefully getting students more interested in what they're doing understanding how they can really use this to change things in their lives in their communities and where they live and replicating the program is kind of the way that it was designed was to be a local focus so it's intended to cater to whatever your local concerns are use local data whatever is available variations in availability provide an opportunity to talk about what would be useful why that data doesn't exist who's deciding what data is collected and really so whatever is there and whatever is not there still gets students to think about data in this more nuanced way integrating it into courses versus doing an independent study it can kind of go either way it's super flexible it's designed to use the strengths of whatever discipline the students are used to in order to understand this new thing whether that be students who are comfortable with math or statistics or data now understanding social issues or students with social issues understanding how data influences those issues that they're used to talking about it's very flexible and going either way and it's really helpful in understanding how the whole thing works together and that's it questions