The Data Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit with a mission of helping people use open data and evidence-informed public policy, hopes to better understand the real impact of recent changes by allowing the public to give feedback about how their work has been impacted on an anonymous, encrypted platform.
The new platform, Secure Anonymous Federal Evidence, Data and Analysis Tracking (SAFE-Track), asks people to submit specific examples of how federal changes are affecting their work and ability to support evidence-informed policymaking. SAFE-Track has no requirement for email or personal identification, has end-to-end encryption of all data and grants complete anonymity for submissions. The portal asks people to be specific about the data asset or analysis that’s impacted.
“It’s meeting a demand that we were hearing from the field and our partners about an interest in sharing more information securely and privately with us to tell the story better,” said Nick Hart, president and CEO of the Data Foundation, in an interview with Government Technology. “It lets us get a better sense of what’s happening across the entire sector in a way that we can articulate back to the policymakers.”
The nonprofit is also collecting public, identifiable feedback through video testimonials and written responses sent to impact@datafoundation.org.
“When we make changes to federal policies, it often has major implications for state and local government, based on how funding flows or guidance from federal data systems affects state and local reporting systems,” Hart said. “So there may be effects that are happening at the state and local level that we’re also interested in capturing.”
As the platform went online Feb. 14, Hart said it's too soon to share any initial trends on the feedback the platform has received.
“We take our duty to do rigorous analysis pretty seriously and we look forward to talking more about it, but it’s too early to say,” he said
Ultimately, the Data Foundation will analyze submissions to find patterns, trends and systematic impacts across the data community. They’ll put together the findings to inform Congress, the White House and other stakeholders about the scope and scale of changes.
The hope is that the foundation will release some initial findings in the coming months.
