Last year, the Insight Exchange Foundation (Domestic Violence Service Management) was looking to understand the perceptions of people who lived experiences of domestic and family violence (DFV) during employment.

Jennifer Sloane, a Civita volunteer and active community member, helped the Domestic Violence Service Management (DVSM) team organise, clean, and analyse data obtained from a survey completed by over 1,000 individuals in Australia.

The organisation, project and goal

The DVSM is a charity that provides support for people experiencing domestic and family violence (DFV) and homelessness. In 2019, the organisation distributed a survey to better understand victims’ perception of workplace responses to DFV.

In 2017, 1 in 6 of women have experienced violence from their partner. Yet, in the same year, only 20% of employees would have felt confident enough to offer help to a…

It all started with a data-hackathon.

On March 2019, Civita organised a data-hackathon called Hackt for Equity in STEM.

Gathering in one of the main rooms of the Engineering building of UTS, the Civita team and more than 30 volunteers worked the whole afternoon on several challenges for social good. Among them, the well-known Sydney community Product Women had come to the afternoon with one question: how can we create a better tracking of our meetups participation?

The reason why this question was close to their heart came from the main success metric of the organisation: bringing more women on board in tech and product management…

Civita was born less than 12 months ago and has had an incredible year of stuttering and first words like #hacktforimpact and #dataequity and days punctuated by the wonders of the data for good world. As a proud parent, watching her beloved not-for-profit standing on its own two feet, I am thrilled to share with you our 2019 review and our goals for 2020.

Where it all starts

Earlier this year, I published an article called “Data For Good is dead, long live Data For Good!”. At this time, I didn’t find that the data for good space had a unified global vision. In…

On the 25th and 26th of October, Civita will join the Climathon to help Sydney prepare for the increasing heatwaves that will take on the city. The goal? Leveraging the power of data to make the city resilient.

“The impacts of extreme heat are deadly, on the rise globally and preventable.”

As this white paper from the Red Cross explains, the impacts of heatwaves can be decreased and even eliminated when the right policies and tools are in place.

The problem that many cities face globally is that this increase of intensity and frequency of heatwaves are a new phenomena…

On Saturday 23rd of March, Civita organised its first Hackt of the year. During three hours, five teams of data scientists, consultants, researchers, students and data enthusiasts collaborated to help organisations reduce the gender gap in the STEM industries.

Why this topic?

Gender equality has generally improved a lot in the past century. Nowadays, in Australia, women and men have theoretically the same rights and opportunities. Despite the legal and social enforcement, women are still underrepresented in most technical fields — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. More precisely, they represent on average only 16% of the workforce in STEM and the rate decreases…

Or your top ingredients to start a basic yet thoughtful journey towards women’s rights support.

For International Women’s rights day, I suggest everyone breaks that bad habit.

No politically correct events with sandwiches and pictures of smiling women from across the world. No inspirational Instagram posts about Woman Power in nice shiny pink letters. No, please. Let’s stop this. This year we need to act more and stop feeling good about ourselves with our yearly quote.

In the past year, I have been very active in the gender equality space. With What is a Woman, I have interviewed women around Eurasia to tell their stories; my novels have been deeply influenced by…

As the founder and co-organizer of Sydney Data for Democracy for the past 15 months, I had an amazing time gathering smart and driven volunteers around data for good projects. Among them we had the creme de la creme: Data scientists who wanted to apply their skills for the common good but also driven students from various fields; researchers; data enthusiasts; consultants;… All of them had one common point: the willingness to use their skills for the social good.

But as one folk singer said once, The Times They Are a-Changin’. Looking at the data, as we always do, the…

At Sydney Data for Democracy, we see the projects and the ideas of our community as small grains that could one day lead to greater changes. Each data for good project is the beginning of a collaboration, a skill and a positive impact on the society as a whole. Two weeks ago, we had the chance to be part of the Visiting Entrepreneur Program and organise our first datahackathon with City of Sydney. This article summarises the awesome afternoon we had with everyone.

On a Saturday afternoon in late November, 35 data science volunteers gathered at the Juanita Nielson Community…