Non-profit data science associations

Hey there,

As we all know, there is more and more available data and more and more efficient ways to analyze them to get useful answers, about pretty much everything. So, statisticians  and “data scientists” in general are usually busy people. However, if some of them ever get bored, there seems to be nice associations out there seeking volunteers to put their big minds to good use!

Here are some I came across recently:

• Statistics without borders is a fairly recent association “under the auspices of the American Statistical Association”, with already 200 statisticians involved. They are currently involved in a project in Haiti to help understanding the impact of the 2010 massive earthquake.
• A new initiative called “Data Without borders”, seems promising. The stated goal is to bridge this gap between the people with data and the people who know what to do with it. Certainly a good idea! You can subscribe to the mailing list here.
• More for the French readers among you: the ENSAE grad school has a charity program here. The goal is to provide statistical power tools to non-profit associations, previous studies include a study for Emmaus and a study for Mobil’douche (douche means shower in French!!), an association providing free mobile showers to homeless people.

With powerful free software like R allowing to carry out complete statistical analysis, I bet there’s going to be many more non-profit data science associations around!

EDIT: the great kaggle.com hosts forecasting competitions including some for non-profit associations, like a recent one from Wikimedia Foundation. Moreover anyone can register and host a competition on this site, so it might be the easiest way for a non-profit association to have data scientists working for them.

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