For its data program for Summer 2018, The San Diego Regional Data Library proposes to build a data repository for water quality data, to make it easier to find water quality data, link it together and to create maps, reports and analyses. The project will be run with a small paid staff and a group of volunteers, and if the project is successful, we will pursue funding for continued maintenance. This project is over, but see theproject website for archived results. Data we expect to collect, process and store will include:

We’re excited to announce the first of our next round of social data projects. Mission Driven Finance is a San Diego impact investment fund that provides loans to nonprofits, social enterprises, and businesses that benefit the San Diego community. MDF is interested in helping businesses understand the regional lending landscape and advocating for improvements to make it easier for businesses that have a hard time getting financing to be able to get the money they need to grow. This project will explore:

Consumer Advocates for RCFE Reform (CARR) works to improve the quality of residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFE) by making public RCFE records and reports easier to find, search and understand. This recent article in Senior Housing and Care Journal provides an excellent introduction to the data issues involved in reviewing these facilities, as does CARR’s final report to the county for the rating system pilot program. For this data project, we will be collecting data to analyze the capacity and affordability of San Diego’s assisted living industry, considering the anticipated need for these services over the next 30 years. The goal is to to identify those communities in San Diego experiencing the greatest difficulty finding and affording assisted living care services. This project will use regional Census data, San Diego’s 211 intake records, SANDAG data, and data from California’s Departments of Health Care Services and Social Services. The analysis from the project will reveal the ability of those 65 and over to afford lifetime average assisted living expenditures of $4,000/month for three years. Of particular interest for this program would be identifying communities with high concentrations of low-income seniors and the availability (or lack thereof) of Assisted Living Medicaid Waiver Program (ALWP) beds within the immediate community. A good place to start for data is the County’s Aging and Independence Services website, but in the kick off meeting will will identify many other sources of data that we should consider and analyze.

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.

Solve Social Problems for $2,700 in Prizes

The San Diego Regional Data Library, the SDSU Society for Statisticians and Actuaries and Teradata are organizing a data analysis contest to aid nonprofits, journalists and government agencies in making better use of data, develop a broader regional capacity for data analysis, and introduce students interested in data analysis to future employers. In this contest, student teams will work on one of three projects, addressing education, food insecurity or community development. After the February 28th kick off, teams will have one week to analyze the data and visualize the analysis, before presenting the results to the public at the March 10 awards ceremony. Data Science FunConference. The Data Contest is running together with a Data Science Conference run by the Python Meetup group, 5 other meetup groups, companies and universities. The conference will feature training sessions, data science training, and software demos. Visit the conference registration page for a full schedule. No Experience Necessary. This event will be held in conjunction with the San Diego Python User Group and San Diego Data Science, who will be offering a data science training class the morning before the contest kickoff. Come early to learn data analysis techniques in your favorite language, then apply them in the contest later in the afternoon. Additionally, Teradata employees will serve as mentors to teams, to offer guidance or help if you get stuck. No Team Required. Singleton analysts are welcome! You can come early for the training session to meet other single analysts, or join a team at the event. College, High-school or Pro. The contest is open to high-school students and college students. Professionals and post-students are welcome to participate too, but only students are eligible for prizes.

Give your nonprofit, agency or news organization valuable data-driven insights by sponsoring a project at our student data analysis contest. The San Diego Regional Data Library, the SDSU Society for Statisticians and Actuaries and Teradata are organizing a data analysis contest to aid nonprofits, journalists and government agencies in making better use of data, develop a broader regional capacity for data analysis, and introduce students interested in data analysis to future employers. Contestant teams will have one week in early March 2015 to answer a set of data-driven questions and visualize the results for one of four projects. Each project will be provided by a nonprofit, government agency or news organization. The contest will be announced in early January, primarily to college students. For a month before the contest begins, the San Diego Regional Data Library will run a special session of its Practical Data Program to train contestants on using data, Python, R, and IPython to analyze data. The contest will be judged based on both the work submitted by the teams after the end of the week and the teams’ presentations’ at an evening event the following week. We are recruiting sponsoring organizations to participate in the contest as: