Civic data science

Civic Data science is an emerging skill set including the ability to discover, integrate and analyze data to tackle public problems, particularly in an urban context. In addition to quantitative social science methods, statistical techniques, and predictive analytics, civic data scientists can readily generate new data through web scraping, instrumentation and other sources using tools developed in the tech community (such as the internet of things digital exhaust). In addition, these applied practitioners are able to integrate this discovered data with other more traditional data sources, as well as clean and join multiple traditional data sources.
At an abstract level, this skill set mirrors the programming, statistical, and domain understanding data scientists used in a commercial contexts and pioneered in Silicon Valley at companies like Facebook and LinkedIn. Civic data scientists, however, operate in domains with significantly higher casual density than web interfaces and ad optimization.
That said, civic data scientists leverage the power of tools developed for the web for data discovery and data integration as well as to communicate their results through interactive data visualization and creative web interfaces. That ability to readily get the right data in the right format and communicate the results using modern digital tools differentiates civic data scientists from traditional quantitative social science researchers, most of whom deal solely in data that is delivered to them in a near ready to analyze format.