Creating data schema for a broader geography

[malakumar85]

Thanks for inviting me to the publicgoods org, @lacabra

Posting this as a recap to our conversation yesterday:

We work would like to work together on a data schema to see if it can eventually be used to tag existing social sector* tools hosted on GitHub. Part of that work will be to reconcile (or segment out) the data schema for projects that are primarily for social good in economically developed countries, as the social sector challenges in those countries don't necessarily map well to the SDGs, e.g. where would a criminal justice project in the US fit into a data schema that uses the SDGs as its primary sorting criteria?

*Note that we'd need to discuss internally at GitHub whether we could use the same criteria as the Digital Public Goods to classify these tools. GitHub Social Impact defines the "social sector" as any organization that primarily works to advance or positively contribute to a social good cause, irrespective of their for/non-profit status.

[lacabra]

Hi @malakumar85, thanks for joining and starting the conversation on this front.

While I acknowledge that the SDGs have a focus on international development, and we inherently associate them to Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC), they are framed globally and all of them apply worldwide. For example, as you may know, in the USA 1 out of 5 children live in poverty, and 1 out of 3 children live in poverty in the UK, so addressing SDG1/No-Poverty and SDG2/End-Hunger will have to happen everywhere.

Addressing your example, a criminal justice project in the US maps well to SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.

Similarly, and only to name a few, we have several projects that are focused on challenges on developed countries:

• Adopt a Drain to "adopt" a storm drain in San Francisco -> mapped to SDG11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
• @firma for digital identities and electronic signatures, aimed at public administrations from the Government of Spain -> mapped to SDG16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
• consul as a citizen participation tool for an open, transparent and democratic government in use in 33 countries that cover the full spectrum of low, medium and high income countries (scroll down to the see the map -> mapped to both SDG11 and SDG16

Even then, we also are including a sectors field aimed to be both broader and more fine-grain-detailed for those cases that SDGs may not be such a great fit, though we have not made that a required field for now.

And to your last point, there is no assumption on the status of the owner organization of any given project/product. We include projects irrespective of that organization as long as the project is open source and openly licensed, so there should not be any conflict there, either 🙂

[conradsp]

Thanks @malakumar85 and @lacabra. As Victor mentioned, at DIAL we have developed a list of sectors that correspond to the products and organizations that we are tracking - and that list forms the basis for the sector list in this repo. However, it may be a worthwhile exercise to develop that list (which I think is probably too long currently) so that it reflects all of the sectors that may be associated with projects that are oriented around 'social good'.

[malakumar85]

Hi @conradsp - would love to explore the list more. @lacabra - as I understand, SDG 16 focuses more on the rule of law and violent crime, rather than the racial or ethnic biases in a prison system. In any case, I'm not an expert on the topic and think it would be good to explore the list more with you both.

As I'm sure is the same with you, I've been swept away by other work. Shall we check in again in a few weeks? Hope you are safe and well!

[malakumar85]

Hi @lacabra - I know I haven't posted on here in forever, but wanted to quickly drop in and say I might have access to a new way to get the mapping of US domestic social sector orgs to the SDGs, as we discussed in March. Will post more information here as I'm able to share.

[lacabra]

Thanks for the update @malakumar85, eager to learn more as you are able to share 🙏

[malakumar85]

Hi @lacabra - just sent you an email with the idea. Will post here once I've fleshed out the idea better.