About

Who am I?

I’m an independent researcher and consultant who is very curious about government data and decision-making.

I like to pull municipal data out of difficult formats, restructure it to be more useful to communities, and make sense of how data drives decisions that affect the lives of people.

My past open data projects have included the open data blog, CPS Apples 2 Apples, which made CPS data available to school communities in order to increase parent engagement at the School and District levels. Also, SchoolCuts.org, the first completely bilingual Open Data app in Chicago available to school communities seeking to understand decisions regarding school closures in Chicago.

I like multidisciplinary collaboration, I like social media, I like education and government organizations, and I like analyzing organizational systems. (I do it for a living.) I use all of these interests to collaborate with others for improving understanding and creating social change.

I also like data.  As a researcher/consultant/designer, I work more often with qualitative data than I do with quantitative data. Although I’ve been an organizational consultant and an ethnographer for a few decades now, I’m not an elected official, I don’t work for any elected officials, and I don’t work for the city.

I’m just a curious person who likes to examine complex systems. Nice to meet you.

If you find any errors or anything missing in my data or analysis, awesome, thank you. Please let me know. One of the purposes of this blog is to get comprehensive data in front of more Evanston residents and folks who don’t have time to chase this information down themselves. It’s also to get clarification on what the data is and what it MEANS. Please, let me know what I can do to correct data, misconceptions, spelling, and so on.  Just drop me a line at insightevanston@gmail.com