Modern life and its civic, environmental and social data are continually recorded. Community action groups encourage people to solve problems they see in their world. Together these resources should enable laypeople to analyze data and use their findings to affect change. But a critical challenge is that most people don’t know how to work with data or make data-driven arguments.
Anyone Can Data (ACD) will be a set of web-based tools that will make it easier for people to find environmental and civic datasets, analyze them, and develop data-driven arguments.
ACD’s key value is that people do not need to understand research protocols or statistics in order to generate results. Instead, working with expert scientists, they use dropdown menus to write their investigation in narrative form. ACD will generate appropriate statistics and graphs based on the user’s inputs. With the support of community partners, ACD users can use the results to inform their advocacy and monitoring strategies.
This work is a reinterpretation of an older graduate school project called AskMobi.