Fellowship: Data + Disasters
I received the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Fellowship to continue reseraching my thesis topic on data and technology’s role in disasters. I organized a design research project with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), the regional planning agency for Metro Boston. Over the course of the spring and summer, I conducted 41 interviews with disaster management agencies and data experts from all over the country. I also spoke with city planners and officials who were hit the hardest in the winter Nor’easters along the Massachusetts coast, documenting their stories and needs during those tough times.
After the interviews, I performed an affinity mapping exercise where I found common themes from the interviews and synthesized them into concrete deliverables for MAPC. My final deliverables for the project were a data advocacy policy memo for the next legistlative session in 2019 and creating an open data portal called MAPC DataCommon. The policy memo outlined ideas for open data frameworks during times of crisis. I intended for these agencies to begin the discussion about sharing data and technology with each other in the event of a natural disaster. For more information about the results, please contact me.
