Greetings, PDAP community! Fundraising news is at the top this time, but there's more down below as always.
We would like to thank Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo and other things, for his generous donation of $100,000. In addition to financial support, he has offered to be an advisor and sounding board to us as we solve problems. This will change our year!
Thank you, newsletter readers, for the interest, conversations, questions, and support. We are excited about the progress we've made since our founding in 2020. Today, I am asking for your financial support to help us further the mission at PDAP. To donate and learn more about how you can make a difference, please visit our website. Thank you again for joining the PDAP movement!
Our efforts to request traffic stop data from the City of Pittsburgh were successful, and led to this article by Public Source. We decided to make the request because we saw contentious traffic stop policy debates in Pittsburgh happening without any shared data. To see the raw data for yourself, check out 2020–22 here and Q12023 here.
The debate will continue, but at least two solid years of public data have been exposed. If you'd like to see some other examples of traffic stop data, start here.
Recently we came across two state-wide projects which do a fantastic job collecting records covering a large geographic area.
If you know of any other solid sources of data, we want to hear about them! Reply to this email or use our form.
Our new staffing strategy is showing success. We brought on an Open-source Facilitator, whose responsibility is to make life easier for our code contributors. After just a month of work with some junior contractors, we have a Flask app working locally which renders a UI from a version of our Data Sources database. Thank you to Emmaline, Kalen, and Marty for your excellent work so far! Stay tuned for updates about the app in the next edition.
That's all for now. As always, you can reply with questions or comments. Thanks for reading!
—Josh from PDAP