Consulting
DAMS teams, usually between three and six members strong, work with outside agencies to help them understand their data through analysis and visualizations. We’re a fast-learning, eager group ready to take on any data challenge. If you’d like to learn more about our data consulting services, please contact us here.
To learn more about some of our consulting projects, read below. The projects listed below all use publicly-available data.
Transportation Projects
AC Transit (Live)
We created a live interactive dashboard for people to use to visualize buses as they travel through the bus system in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Buses are represented as dots, with lines representing common routes. The locations of buses are updated by AC Transit approximately every 30 seconds.
Monterey Collisions
For Monterey county, we designed an interactive dashboard to help them visualize the frequency and severity of different types of car accidents on their roads.
Contra Costa County I-680 Traffic
This interactive dashboard, created for Contra Costa County, helps us understand traffic behavior along the I-680 corridor in the county, showing data like speed, flow, VHT, and VMT as well as collisions data.
Oakland Residential Instability
This interactive dashboard was created for the City of Oakland to help them visualize demographic data about different neighborhoods of the city. It shows racial, income, and average rent data as well as other indices like Healthy Places and Economic Vulnerability.
California Transportation Commission
Through our partnership with the California Transportation Commission (CTC), we work to develop visualizations to map out awarded projects for the Solutions for Congested Corridors, Trade Corridor Enhancement, and Local Partnerships (Competitive) Programs.
Earth Projects
Climate Score Project
There are 7,383 legislators in America – and they control crucial climate policy decision. They set clean energy and car standards, and decide natural disaster funding. But right now, there’s no way to understand how state legislators vote on climate. That’s why Climate Cabinet is creating the Climate Cabinet Score: a centralized place where ever legislator, nationwide, receives a “Climate Score” for their votes. We’re working with Climate Cabinet to understand publicly available data on legislator votes to give each legislator a climate score value.
Waste at Stanford
We’re working with Sustainable Stanford to develop visualizations of energy landmarks and other Stanford energy data. Our goal is to utilize its monthly waste data to the fullest extent possible to inform building-level improvements and campus-wide programs to support the university’s zero waste by 2030 goal.
Education Projects
Equity Badge (Proposed)
Universities take metrics like US News World Report rankings seriously. There are lots of ways colleges are scored–faculty/student ratios, tuition, and graduation rate, to name a few. Unfortunately, because many of these rankings favor prestige, selectivity and wealth, they create incentives for institutions to enroll wealthier students over low-income students, furthering economic inequality on college campuses. Minority and low-income students don’t currently have a way to easily identify schools that will serve them with an accessible and equitable education. There are a variety of equity evaluations and metrics out there, but they are often hard to connect or interpret. We are working with the Common App to develop an “Equity Badge” system to score colleges based on how well they serve underprivileged students.
Transfer Student Data
The Common App is working on products to help transfer students. We’re working with them to parse & understand their unwieldly datasets through data cleaning and dashboarding.
Revolutionize Common App
The Common App is a great system for most colleges to efficiently collect student data. However, for many community colleges, the form doesn’t match their needs, and as an application in general, there is room for improvement. We are researching pain points and implementing design solutions to make the Common App more user-friendly and allow for community colleges to use the platform as well.
