josh-pdap

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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Clarifying: when I said "otherwise did not have "coworkers" or "co-volunteers" I mean only for a period of a few months. There have almost always been people in the Discord to respond if something came up, but there
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
“working forwards” is a good phrase. Thanks for this whole comment!
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
I can only give my perspective on the project: I showed up when PDAP had 2,500 members in Slack, right after Kristin made her original case study and Reddit post. There was a flurry of conversation. I empathize with the people trying to kee
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Yes, I've linked to it other places on the page but Measures for Justice is doing that. https://measuresforjustice.org/infrastructure
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Yep, almost all the data is useful for one reason or another. The point is to paint a picture of police activity in general.
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
The FBI and other police organizations are certainly interested in using police data to make the job as safe as possible, for the police as well as the people they’re sworn to protect and serve.
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Thanks for all this. Articulating why it’s important in a few words is incredibly difficult and something we’re always working on. The bottom line is that we believe public information should be easily accessible; hundreds of thousands of p
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Interesting, what are you using them for? Most of our scrapers are written by inexperienced volunteers so this is probably still quite valuable as is. If it works, we’ll take it. You could also raise a hand as a human data source; perhaps o
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Yes! Police, jails, and courts. Those are all under the umbrella of criminal justice data, and all contextualize each other. Could you share what you’ve made somehow? josh.chamberlain@pdap.io or discord are likely the best way. Would also b
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
We definitely want scrapers to be maintained as-needed, as opposed to trying to spin all the plates. It’d be thousands of thousands. Measures for Justice is working on developing standards: https://measuresforjustice.org/
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
We do want to be careful with PII. We don’t want to make a big table of PII, although tables of PII are regularly published to government websites as html tables. Yet another reason to keep data decentralized while pointing people to it fro
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
I appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me. As a non-engineer I think I’m following you. When you say “I know what those people are capable of” do you mean something as ominous as that sounds?
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Thanks for wanting to help! If you go to https://docs.pdap.io you should be able to find out how to contribute Data Sources. No coding required. Holler in Discord or email me (josh.chamberlain@pdap.io) if you have trouble!
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
In our case it’s about working with local activists and journalists. Police are decentralized; each department acts independently, for the most part. Most people using the data seem to be using it locally; when policies are changed, they ar
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
I will say that we are not wading into this. We focus on accessibility; if you point to a big pile of ugly data, the first thing that will happen is that a bunch of very smart people will analyze it. We’re trying to make the big pile, which
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
I’m not aware of one. Tracking people is hard because names aren’t unique; it’s a challenge tracking officers as they move between departments, too.
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Your question makes sense. I’ve addressed this elsewhere but I’m currently just answering on my phone so I’ll summarize by saying that our focus is on complete, solid local data one municipality at a time (full context is really helpful whe
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
We’ve looked at this and it’s pretty exciting! Have you used it? Know of any particularly relevant case studies we should look at?
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Tougher to answer, but maybe more useful, would be “What harm reduction strategies are being tried in other cities? Are they working?” this is at the intersection of policy and outcome and takes a lot of context.
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response! This is really helpful. 1. Agreed. Our strategy for this isn’t clear on the website, I guess, but we do have one. It’s to focus on depth in geographic areas. This is because context is critical, and becau
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Thanks! I contacted them and I've been reinstated.
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Can you say more about this? Feel free to reach out to my email (josh.chamberlain@pdap.io) if you'd like to share more. It sounds like you have some expertise that would be incredibly useful to us.
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Aren't forums like this for devil's advocating, like, almost exclusively? Working as expected! We've come a long way since that post in terms of strategy and focus. Most of that time was spent with between 1 and 3 volunteers,
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
It's ok, this feedback is how we understand what our work looks like to other people, and how we improve! We've only had paid staff for about 6 weeks. We've run several experiments and started from scratch a few times over th
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
Thanks! It wasn't me who posted the article, but I agree with the theory that it's likely some well-meaning "new account spam prevention" thing.
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
We're still developing those relationships, and we haven't generated any novel data that is deeper than web URLs. I'm based in Pittsburgh so we're still working with local journalists, activists, etc. to understand how t
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
What do you mean? I can still see it, but you can't?
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
We don't have any scraped data yet. I replied to the parent post addressing some of this, but mostly if people need the data they run a scraper locally and use the data that way. At the moment, our energy is going into building an app
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
I love that you wrote it on BART. I spent my year of BART time solving chess puzzles. "Making public information public" is a good tagline too. Do you know what kinds of work people did with the data? It seems to me one of the bes
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by josh-pdap 4y ago
1. I replied to the parent comment here; our answer to the scale problem is to recognize that people doing web scraping are as decentralized as the police. Our goal is to empower people who have questions about the police to answer them. 2.

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