Crafting Models for Equity

by Heather Krause | Nov 26, 2021 | Analysis

Author’s Note: This is going to be a long piece, but if we can get this concept down we’ll learn a way to embed our equity priorities deep, deep into the mathematical heart of our data work. Let’s go. The Model: A reflection of the world as the modeller understands...

The First Step in Equitable Predictions

by Heather Krause | Oct 7, 2021 | Analysis

When we use data to predict something, there’s more than one way to improve the equity of that process. The one that we usually start with is setting a tolerance level for the gap between the group our predictive model works best for and the one it performs worst at....

Motivation Touchstones: Rewards

by Heather Krause | Sep 24, 2021 | Motivation

When it comes to data projects, one of the most powerful tools we use is what we call a Motivation Touchstone. It’s a document that you and your team can return to over and over for guidance when figuring out how to make effective and equitable decisions at every step...

We Need to Fill in the Blanks in our Social Identity Data

by Heather Krause | Aug 27, 2021 | Communication & Distribution, Data Collection & Sourcing, Interpretation

Everytime I see a stat like “25% of respondents are Black”, I see only one piece of a four-piece puzzle filled in. With only this piece, I don’t know how to use this information. I don’t know if it matches the category from my dataset, I...

What Data Relationship are You In?

by Heather Krause | Jul 25, 2021 | Data Collection & Sourcing, Funding

When we want to address equity in data science, we often need to talk about power and we sometimes need to talk about money. It can be useful to think about an individual’s data like a raw resource, you could call it something cheesy like “Dataonium”. There’s a reason...