Helping your Community with Data Science

I'm a data scientist (machine learning engineer) and would like to use my skills to help others in my community. I'd also really like to help others help others.

So I'm starting a project to bring together volunteer data scientists, engineers and students with non-profits and organizations to find opportunities to do good in their own communities.

There are other 'data science for good' organizations out there such as DataKind, Code for America, Civis Analytics etc. and I'd like to use them as a blueprint to get people engaged with grassroots efforts to help in their own neighborhoods and communities.

I'm looking for advice as well as example projects and efforts to learn from. We won't shy away from using cutting edge machine learning where appropriate though I expect most projects to be un-glamorous data work (cleaning, cataloging, documenting, EDA) with some analytics and KPI tracking ... and that is fine, as long as it makes people more efficient and effective at helping their audience.

Have you ever worked on anything like that? Heard of anything like that? Or have ideas for what would be useful for the organizations you've encountered? Do you know of any good case studies or of any organizations/organizers I should talk to?

If you have some ideas, know of an organization we can work with or are interested in helping/learning more, get in touch and lets talk.

Thanks,

Julio