The Public Lab nonprofit is happy to announce that the Foundation to Promote Open Society, a part of the Open Society Foundations, has awarded Public Lab a two year grant to launch the Data Advocacy initiative and assist in hiring a Data Ambassador to lead the program.

The Data Ambassador will be responsible for working with people and organizations on ways to use their data to advocate for positive change for their community, and developing strategies for easy data interpretation. They will provide critical support for the Public Lab community, working with participants on how to interpret data they’ve collected, present it in an impactful way, and prepare data for inclusion in larger, standardized datasets.

The Data Advocacy initiative will cover multiple Public Lab regions to provide support to groups that have an identified data interpretation or advocacy need. The Data Ambassador will assist in identifying the most useful advocacy pathways, including data standardization and interpretation, impactful messaging and storytelling, and mapping power relationships.