Building the Foundation of Shared Truth Using Data

I have some exciting news.

I have been selected for an O'Shaughnessy Fellowship to help build out Data 4 The People.

O'Shaughnessy Ventures awards these fellowships to builders and researchers working on ambitious ideas, and this year they chose to back the work many of you have been following here. I'm honored and thrilled. (If you want the formal version, OSV's announcement is here.)

Here's what it means.

Data 4 The People's vision is to develop shared understanding of truth using data. Shared truth is the fabric of a vibrant society and democracy, and data can (and should) be the bedrock of shared truth.

Sadly, data is a double-edged sword. In the wrong hands, it can extort, extract, profiteer, vilify, separate, and kill. But my favorite band GoGo Penguin titled one of their songs "The Antidote Is in the Poison." This is true for data. It can also be used for good: it can connect, lift up, fix, build empathy, and rebuild. We need to make it easier for people to do this, and with AI, now we can. That's the infrastructure we plan to build in the coming year.

Over the next year, that means three things: rescuing public datasets at risk of disappearing, training AI on our analytical methods so the work gets faster and cheaper, and partnering with local newsrooms to give community journalism the data infrastructure it needs but can't afford to build alone.

My deepest gratitude to O'Shaughnessy Ventures for putting their trust in us to do this essential work. We're going to get it done.

And thank you for reading. None of this works without an audience that cares about getting the numbers right. The fellowship is for the long-term build: giving people the tools to do this kind of analysis themselves. But we can’t just build for the future. We must research, analyze, write, and publish data-driven insights that connect people right now. And so we write. Five days a week, all free, and none of it lives on social media.

See you in the data

~Eric