Digital Transformation describes a staggering task for our society and access to relevant knowledge is limited. The increasing demand for technical and methodological expertise in combination with domain knowledge significantly impacts the European job market. In this vein, a new job description as well as a new string of education emerged: Data Science.
As access to expertise in Data Science is sparse, all over Europe qualified volunteers are organized as regional or national initiatives to address the fact that social organizations in Europe do not have sufficient access to relevant knowledge and tools in order to adequately address Digital Transformation. Organized in regional or national teams, volunteers support social organizations to make use of their data by connecting them with volunteer data scientists and analysts.
This idea goes back to the initiative “Data Science for Social Good”, founded in Chicago, and inspired regional experts in Europe to organize similar initiatives in their region. Leading initiatives in Europe are Data Science for Social Good (Germany, UK and Portugal), Data for Good (Denmark, France, Poland and Spain) and Correlaid (Germany and France). Although a few initiatives in Europe do already exist, every initiative is individually organized and there are no European open resources comprising workflows and best practices for Data for Good initiatives. Groups are mostly organized in local or national heterogenous teams and are established by individual initiatives. Due to the fact that the demand for expert knowledge in the field of Data Science has been increasing, students and professionals need access to target group specific courses, and higher education institutions need access to customized learning material that takes into account different scientific backgrounds.
Project EPSILON addresses the needs of both European Data for Good initiatives and HE institutions. Together with a leading European initiative, Data Science for Social Good Portugal, we will design tailored workflows and tools for European initiatives. We will set up a European Knowledge Platform and initiate a new Data for Good initiative in Lithuania. The gained experience and knowledge will be transformed into target group specific learning material for higher education students, teachers and alumni.
Project design and intended outputs clearly align with the long-term education goals of the European Union, e.g. as codified in the Digital Education Action Plan for 2021-2027. As the EU is foreseen to play a more active role in supporting Member States and the education and training sector with tools, frameworks, guidance, technical expertise and research, the outputs to be developed within EPSILON project could be a small, but significant component for reaching this goal.