Data Science Careers in the Public & Nonprofit Sector

You will find here some resources for students and faculty that are applying data science tools to public and nonprofit sector contexts. These include pedagogical resources for students doing graduate-level work in MPA, MPP or nonprofit programs, PhD seminars that share data programming resources, and data science methods within the field of public policy using R. 


CONTENT:




Careers

Although the learning curve is steep, there are clear pay-offs. Nonprofits, governments, foundations, and think-tanks are actively seeking people with data science training to work as policy analysts, evidence-based managers, chief data officers, or evaluation specialists.

The UK Government has put together a nice overview on data science career paths in government.

Job Growth for R Skills

Example Fellowships:

Data Incubator [ fellowship overview ]
Data Science for the Public Good [ link ]

Example Job Boards:

Indeed + “R Statistics” [ link ]
R Users [ link ]
Zip Recruiter [ link ]




Professional Training

Data Science Courses in Public Affairs Schools

Degree Programs

Training Opportunities in Government

  • Datapolitan [ link ]
  • San Francisco [ link ]
  • New York [ link ]
  • Department of Commerce [ link ]
  • Health and Human Services [ link ]




Data Science Communities

R Open Science [ link ]
R Open Government [ link ]
R Ladies [ link ]
Conferences [ link ]
Nonprofit Open Data Collective [ link ]
GitHub’s Government Team [ link ]

Professional Networks

Ford Foundation: Public Interest Technology [ link ]
Bloomberg Foundation: What Works Cities [ link ]

Blogs and Listservs

R-Bloggers [ link ]
R Weekly [ link ]
Stack Overflow [ link ]
Flowing Data [ link ]

Data Science Podcasts

Data Points by GovEx [ link ]
Partial Derivative [ link ]
DMV Nation [ link ]
Becoming a Data Scientist [ link ]
Data Stories [ link ]
Talking Machines [ link ]
Not So Standard Deviations [ link ]
Data Skeptic [ link ]
More Or Less [ link ]
Linear Digression [ link ]
R-Podcast [ link ]

Data Journalists, Bloggers & Civic Groups

Trend CT [ link ] [ github ] [ style guide
Todd Schneider [ blog ] [ github ]
I Quant NY [ blog ]
ChartsNThings: A Blog by the NYT Graphics Dept [ link ]
Data for Democracy [ link ]