You are invited to join an upcoming virtual event, during which Cities@Tufts will host Dana R Thomson, PhD for Co-Design in Global Development Data Initiatives:
Wednesday, December 6 at 12 PM EST
Cities@Tufts is a free online lecture series presented by Shareable and Tufts University’s Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning!
What is co-design, and what does it look like in global initiatives that produce data about development indicators? Projects that strive for inclusivity might hold well-designed multi-stakeholder engagement workshops throughout a project, but still see limited local uptake of their data in the end. Why are multi-stakeholder workshops usually not enough? How might global data initiatives find grounding in the multitude of realities that exist across, and even within, communities? This presentation reflects on how global data initiatives might unintentionally exclude the voices they care about most, and introduces a framework for (more) equitable and inclusive data co-design processes.
A Q&A moderated by professor Julian Agyeman will follow.
A bout Dana R Thomson, PhD
Dr. Thomson has worked at the intersection of demography, public health, and geography for two decades, and strives for open data, user-centered design, equitable partnerships that address historical inequities, and co-design of meaningful information.
Dana helped to establish, and now coordinates, the Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) Network which brings together experts from traditionally-siloed “slum” mapping traditions including community members, government officials, humanitarians, and data scientists.
Dana holds a BA in Geography from the George Washington University, an MSc in Global Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health, and an MSc and PhD in Social Statistics from the University of Southampton (UK). Her research has evaluated the accuracy of gridded population estimates and their feasibility for household survey fieldwork in lower- and middle-income countries, as well as several large-scale evaluations of health systems using geospatial and household survey data.