On Monday I gave a talk at the White House. The event was the kick-off for the Open Opportunity Data project. As part of the project, the White House opened up datasets from across agencies and invited tech developers to build something useful with the data. There weren’t many parameters. We were just asked to make something that could help people and their communities.
It’s a simple idea. But powerful. Our government worked hard to release more than 200,000 new datasets, and to make them open and accessible. But if you need to be a data scientist to make sense of it, it’s not much use for the general public.
At a time when data can help you figure out what movie you’ll like, developers should be thinking about how data can be used to help folks improve their everyday circumstances.
Take Breonna Rogers, a community organizer in Baltimore. At Monday’s event, she took the stage before me and told the best comeback story I’ve ever heard.
Just a few years ago, Breonna was a single mom living in a shelter with a new baby. She commuted eight hours by bus every day. She knew this wasn’t sustainable, so she worked hard to improve her lifestyle with help and support from people in her community.
Today Breonna is working towards her accounting degree. She has a home of her own and a good job that she can walk to in 10 minutes. Breonna was gracious for getting on that stage and sharing some of her personal struggles. And it really hit home for me why we were all gathered in that room.
It wasn’t about data. Not really. Or impressive feats of engineering. It was about people.
So Redfin decided to use this new open data to help our customers. Like Breonna, many of our home buyers struggle to find a home they can afford in a neighborhood that’s easy to get to from work.
We came up with Opportunity Score. It’s a tool powered by Walk Score and data from the Department of Commerce. It shows jobs you can get to from any address in a half hour without a car. We also built in an option to show all the affordable homes that are easy to get to from your job.
Breonna was a tough act to follow, but her story reminded me why we’re building Opportunity Score and the impact that we hope it will have. We’re finishing up the tool now and will let you know once it’s ready for everybody to use.
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