What Choice Do I Have?

by Heather Krause | Jun 20, 2022 | Analysis, Communication & Distribution, Data Collection & Sourcing, Funding, Interpretation, Motivation, Project Design

The Data Equity Framework is a process that helps you to identify the many key choices you’ll have to make in a data project and provides tools and strategies to help improve your choice-making to better align with your equity goals. The other day someone raised a common question during one of my workshops:

“That’s great and all, but your Framework assumes that we are empowered to actually make these choices… what if, like me, you aren’t?”

Improving something means changing something. If we want to improve the equity of our data work, we’ll need to change how we go about it and that can feel somewhere along the spectrum from hard to impossible for many of us.

However, do we really mean it when we say that we “don’t have a choice”? Or do we mean “we don’t have a choice that costs us nothing”, or “we don’t have a choice that doesn’t make us uncomfortable” or “we don’t have a choice that is easy/risk-free/requires no work on our part”. One of the biggest equity problems in data right now is that the burden and vulnerability of not making a better choice simply get shifted onto the most vulnerable or powerless people involved in your project.