Data Science has brought enormous economic and practical benefits to large sectors of the global economy.
Data Science can help improve the impact of charitable NGOs and non-profits with positive social missions, but generally these organisations cannot pay the high costs of data services and personnel.
To fill the gap, volunteer data science organisations have stepped up to provide free services to support charitable organisations. These are often in the form of hackathons, competitions, or short-term projects, all of which can be of great benefit to the assisted organisation. However, the transient nature of these projects can limit their impact.
Once hackathons or short-term projects are handed over to the NGO, there is often not enough resources (i.e, staff with the needed technical background) to keep the result of the projects in productive use.. Most data related products are in need of recurring monitoring and maintenance. Without this, there will be no sustainable long term impact from the project/product.
DataCross fills this gap by providing data science pipeline monitoring and maintenance services to NGOs once the initial project has ended and the product has been deployed successfully. DataCross will provide a trusted partner for NGOs, confidentially managing data transfer and access. DataCross will build teams of volunteer data scientists, scope data projects in conjunction with NGOs, oversee and manage those projects, and perform follow-up monitoring and maintenance once projects are handed over to the NGOs. While the initial project will be performed on a purely voluntary basis, DataCross wants to compensate people who provide maintenance on projects where this is needed to achieve long-term impact. The cost-benefit ratio of this long-term maintenance is huge, since often very little, but still regular, maintenance is needed to keep the data product in productive use. Based on our prior experience we estimate that more than 90% of the work will be the initial, voluntary work on the projects. We will only offer long-term maintenance for projects where we see it necessary to do so, and it will still be free of charge for the NPOs since we plan to use donated funds to cover for the costs.
DataCross does not only provide impact via data science services. With data becoming ever more available, DataCross wants to sensitize the nonprofit sector, data science professionals and the broader public about how this data can be used for good. We will do this via events that are accessible to everyone who is interested in these topics. These events could for example be data-dialogues where nonprofit organizations talk about how they have used data to achieve a higher impact, presentations or panels where the challenges of ethical artificial intelligence are discussed or educational and networking events for data interested people.
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To support our charitable mission, DataCross will seek public and private funds to make our work sustainable, and to directly fund data science maintenance and monitoring activities.
DataCross defines itself as a nonprofit support organization, which according to von Schnurbein et al. (2014) “use donations of time as a buffer for the benefit of NPOs with low purchasing power, and thereby enhance the professional quality and impact of the nonprofit sector” (p. 2). Von Schnurbein et al. (2014) find that nonprofit support organizations such as DataCross provide low-resource NPOs with excellence and help them respond to the pressure for professionalization.
By using Switzerland as a base, DataCross has access to a network of experienced Data Scientist volunteers thanks to the high technology industries homed there. The reputation of Switzerland as a crucial location for charities will benefit DataCross and allow us to reach NPOs with global missions and particularly in the Global South. The robust philanthropy sector in Switzerland will provide DataCross’s charitable mission with support.
Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash