Data, Program Measurement, and Research OKR:
Champion cross-workstream collaboration and communication efforts to foster information-sharing and effective partnerships.
In the CDE’s midyear impact report, we described progress in creating a data dashboard to tie in data from a number of partner organizations. We were especially interested in the data being collected from three key partners: Per Scholas (which provides tuition-free IT education), Eliminate the Digital Divide (E2D), and the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library system. By sharing data, these partner organizations can collect and coordinate activities such as device distribution, class schedules, and so much more. The ultimate goal, however, is to create a data dashboard that, theoretically, any partner could contribute to and use.
But scaling such a tool has to be done thoughtfully and intentionally, which is why the dashboard went through a pilot phase this year with the above-named organizations. As part of the pilot program, we wanted to hear from organizations “doing work on the ground” about how they would best like to contribute their data and how they might use the dashboard.
For example, we wanted to know:
- What data would your organization be willing and able to share? What would be “safe” for you to provide?
- What kinds of data would be useful but are currently lacking?
- What are your existing policies for data-sharing and data governance?
- How often can you share your data?
- How do you want to see data?
The conversations we had with our partner organizations during this pilot phase turned out to be critical, especially as each organization differed in their abilities and expectations, and these in turn sometimes differed from the abilities and expectations of the CDE. For example, two of these organizations were expecting to share their data in batches every six months. The team in the Data, Program Measurement, and Research Workstream were hoping to combine and share out data once a month. Thus, we had to make the argument for more-frequent data collection and then simplify the process so that our partner organizations felt well supported to implement a more frequent data-sharing cadence.
While our pilot program is still ongoing, we feel much more confident now that other partners can be onboarded in a way that makes sense for all involved. We are currently making plans to scale the data dashboard tool and look forward to the day when it will further inform both community action and governmental policy.
