Data for Public Good - A Voting Rights Case Study

The Center for New Data (New Data) was formed in 2020 with a stated mission of providing cutting-edge data science services and data analysis on topics of critical importance to society and democracy and predicated on the belief that academics, journalists, government decision-makers, and the general public deserve better insights from big data. Our analytical work on voting wait times has garnered high-profile attention from governments, non-profits, and legal advocates. But the analytical results are the end product—it’s the data that drives the program. In this presentation, we will peek behind the curtain. The audience will learn:

• How New Data brought together disparate data sets to drive analytical insights;
• What New Data does to ensure that personally identifiable data is never put at risk;
• The publication ethics policies that New Data embraces to ensure transparency of our analytical results; and
• The priority New Data places on a rigorous data governance policy as a way to keep our program on track and best serve our constituents.

Speakers: Kathy Rondon and Susama Agarwala

Kathy Rondon

Kathy Rondon is a data governance thought leader and educator who has worked as a government employee and contractor in information management and data governance for nearly 30 years. Most of her career has focused on the proper handling, classifications, controls, and clearance of national security data, and she has recently applied this expertise to designing and delivering enterprise-level training on the governance of public sector data assets. Her current areas of focus are data ethics and data curation. She is the author of We The People: A Playbook for Data Ethics in a Democratic Society.

Susama Agarwala

Dr. Susama Agarwala leads the Center for New Data’s data science initiatives. Dr. Agarwala studied mathematics and physics at MIT, earned her doctorate in mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, and has held research or faculty positions at Oxford University, Caltech, and the US Naval Academy. She is passionate about algorithmic fairness and using data to study societal structural inequalities.