How Can Human Rights Organizations Use Data to Change the World?

Data mining increasingly drives our lives: what movies we watch, what products we buy, and who we are friends with. Scientists work with data to build tools that help us make decisions in our lives. Much of their efforts focus on making us more comfortable, but we can also use data to solve big problems. How can we use data for social good?

As human rights organizations confront the need to understand and analyze vast amounts of data, they must ask how data can foster and grow more open societies. Organizations like DataKind—a community of pioneering data scientists and social innovators—help nongovernmental organizations use data to change the world.

At a recent talk, Jake Porway, executive director of DataKind, explained how nongovernmental organizations use data, how they can use it better, and what data science can do for civil society.

Listen above.