Healthy Food Access Data Library Project

Collect and analyze data about the food system in San Diego county.

The San Diego Food System Alliance’s Healthy Food Access Working Group is developing an indicator library to analyze food access issues, and we need your help to locate datasets, wrangle them into useable shape, and create visualizations.

The work is similar to the topics of our March 2015 Data Contest, with additional work of building a reusable data library to perform additional analysis.

This project needs volunteers with a range of skills, including:

  • Administration and logistics: Call potential data providers, locate datasets, and arrange meetings and events.
  • Data wranglers: People skilled with either Excel or Python to manipulate datasets.
  • Data analysts: Data analysis who know R or Python/Pandas.

We will be starting with a list of potential datasets, from which we will construct Ambry Data Bundles. We can load the bundles into a data library. Then we can do visualizations and analysis, such as this map from a project at Palomar College.

How To Participate

To participate in this project, join the practical data program, then join the project mailing list by selecting the “Food Access” list under the “List Memberships” section of your profile page.

Team meetings will be posted to our Meetup.com site,  the Practical Data Program site, and our Practical Data Program mailing lists. We’ll have our first meetings to get started in late August.