Somerville Housing Challenge Pilot Workshop

The Somerville Housing Challenge Pilot Workshop will be the first of what we hope will be an ongoing process to explore publicly available data related to housing (and, eventually, other topics!) We hope to bring together people who understand housing challenges and people interested in data analysis/coding. We hope to ask and begin to answer some questions about aspects of Somerville’s affordability and housing crisis. Teams may also wish to begin to design applications that relate to housing. It’s an all-hands-on-deck invitation – join in whatever background, interests, and experiences you bring!

The day’s agenda will go roughly like this:

· 1-1:15PM: Introductions and overview of day.

· 1:15-2PM: Presenters share: 1. personal and professional experiences with the housing crisis, and 2. basic and more advanced techniques to analyze the data available.

· 2-2:15 PM: Coordinators of break-out groups introduce data available and possible questions the data may help answer. Also, we will discuss a data privacy protocol.

· 2:15-4 PM: Teams meet to explore questions we have, and to clarify study questions and begin to answer them.

· 4-4:45 PM: Teams present on their work… attendees discuss, share feedback.

· 4:45-5PM: Entire group discusses next steps (We expect this will be the first of an ongoing series of housing challenge discussions)

· 5-6PM: Anyone interested attends post-event happy hour!

RSVP: Please register so we know how many people to expect. You can also share the registration link: https://goo.gl/forms/57dYhvgkckb2Clzg2 and join this mailing list to be part of the planning conversation: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/housinghackathonchallenge.

CONTACT: Stephanie Hirsch (stephanie@stephaniehirsch.org, 617-512-4847) and Jamie O’Keefe (jokeefe@jamesokeefe.org) with questions or suggestions.

More info at https://somervillehousingchallenge.org.