Thanks for the thoughtful response! This is really helpful.
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.