Posted by
Daniel Haran on
Oct 16, 2008; 2:33pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/How-will-we-use-data-tp1356.html
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Ilona Dougherty
<
[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Just a note to say that if anyone can give me a sense of how Apathy is
> Boring might be able to use these election results tools in our work, I
> would be really happy to promote that this info is available.
>
> Let me know what you think might be relevant to our audience.
>
> Ilona
Russell has some great answers. Once you find out what ridings could
have been changed by students voting, how you use that information is
really up to you and your imagination.
Does it help target campaigns?
Do you make it part of a campaign message?
Can you use it to bolster your case when fundraising?
Can it help you identify allies that want to reach those constituencies?
Looking at data another way, you could try measuring the impact of
your campaigns. Does campaign spend correlate to increase turnout?
So the issue here is that without knowing your organization very well,
it's difficult to suggest what to do with liberated data, or how to
use its insights. As more data gets liberated and we get better at
imagining uses for it, we might stumble upon the 'killer app'.
Geeks have a pretty poor track record predicting what their toys will
be used for. Maybe it's myth that the first proposed use for a
personal computer was a recipe collection. In any case, the killer app
turned out to be the spreadsheet, and decades later we still don't
have a decent way to collect recipes.
It would be great to identify uses for data that would compel people
to join our campaign - the same way businesses bought computers so
they could use spreadsheets.
I know some people on this list have good, deep knowledge of how
groups could use data. Can you share use cases to prime our
imaginations?
Identifying uses might be easiest face to face, either in a charrette
or brainstorming format.
That doesn't really answer Ilona's question, but hopefully it starts a
good conversation thread :)
d.