Harnessing the Power of the Crowd to Increase Capacity for Data Science in the Social Sector

We present three case studies of organizations using a data science competition to answer a pressing question. The first is in education where a nonprofit that creates smart school budgets wanted to automatically tag budget line items. The second is in public health, where a low-cost, nonprofit womens’ health care provider wanted to understand the effect of demographic and behavioral questions on predicting which services a woman would need. The third and final example is in government innovation: using online restaurant reviews from Yelp, competitors built models to forecast which restaurants were most likely to have hygiene violations when visited by health inspectors.1 Finally, we reflect on the unique benefits of the open, public competition model.