
What Data Relationship are You In?
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...

Motivation Touchstones: Using Restrictions to Your Advantage
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...

How People are Using Equity Gap Scores
We've said it before: When you need to know more than just a general average, you need an Equity Gap Score. An average tells you what happened and an Equity Gap Score tells you for who. Each piece of information needs the other to give meaning. If you have a mandate...

The Power Dynamics of Data Jargon
Early in my career, I was working on a project using education data, and we were having a meeting with policymakers, school principals, and a team of researchers. When one of the principals asked a question about what assumptions were used in crafting one of the...

Learning to Love Uncertainty (Why We Need to Stop Using “Not Statistically Significant”)
I want to talk to you about why you should stop saying "not statistically significant" based on sample size alone.The term "not statistically significant" should only be applied to a hypothesis, not a sample size, and even then it's an arbitrary line we've drawn to...

Learning from Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Learning #1: Indigenous Quantitative Methods A few months ago I set out to create a research brief of Indigenous Quantitative Methodologies. I wanted to start a survey of just some of the existing ways that Indigenous cultures around the world create knowledge and...

Research Brief: Paying Respondents for Data
Does Paying or Compensating Survey Respondents Negatively Affect Response Quality or Reliability?At We All Count, we think a lot about how to increase the equity of the data gathering process. We make a living off of the data science ecosystem and so do many of our...

Thoughts from Talking Data Equity: RFPs
At our recent Talking Data Equity session, 150+ people turned up to discuss one of the most important (and frustrating) parts of the data ecosystem in the mission-driven sector: Requests for Proposals (RFPs). If you haven’t been through such a process, it's...

How to Talk to Your Boss About Data Equity
Talking about data equity can be tricky. Maybe you've been to a conference or a workshop where you encountered an idea, a tool or a process that you're super excited about. You want to bring it up with your team on Monday but by then you're a little hazy on the...

Getting Past Identity to What You Really Want
Too often in data science, we use identity categories. We once were hired by clients involved in a youth mental health situation where they needed to target scarce resources (why the resources were scarce is an entirely other conversation for a different...