California Election 2020 Data Challenge

Challenge Overview

California voters are presented with an average of 10 ballot initiatives each election year. These propositions are an important way for Californians to shape the future of our state.

But, many voters say there are too many of them and that they’re too complicated and confusing to understand. Voters also often worry about their ability to make an informed decision. The CA Election 2020 Data Challenge is designed to leverage public data to help us understand this year’s ballot initiatives.

Participants working in teams of two or more selected one of the November 3rd, 2020 California Ballot Initiatives and, using at least one publicly available dataset, create a project culminating in a data visualization that explores or analyzes an aspect of the issue. Multiple teams could choose to work on the same ballot initiative but each team had to have their own unique research question.

This 2020 Challenge builds upon DataLab’s “PropFest 2018” where successful projects included pursuits that:

• Analyzed potential impacts of a proposed initiative on specific regions, sectors and/or demographics;
• Tracked and summarized the historical development of a proposition; and
• Fact-checked rhetoric or claims on both sides of the debate.

By October 4th all competing teams uploaded a short (< 10 minute) video presentation of their project and data visualization (along with the link to the project’s public GitHub repository) to a Virtual Showcase which ran asynchronously on October 5th-6th. All teams were encouraged to submit their project (even if unfinished), review each other’s visualizations, and offer helpful, supportive, and constructive comments and questions. By observing the progress of the other teams, participants not only grow their network and skill set, but also gain insights to help improve their final project. And remember, the most collegial individuals also win a prize!

Judges reviewed all submissions and selected up to three finalists to win up to $500 and present their project to the broader campus community at the online Webinar on Wednesday, October 21 (5-7pm).

Prizes

Anyone from the UC Davis community and beyond was invited to participate on a team. Only current UC Davis students and postdoctoral scholars were eligible to win monetary prizes. Teams without a lead who is a current student or postdoc were welcome to participate but were not eligible for the prizes. Prizes were only be awarded to teams whose project focused on an issue relating to a single initiative on the November 3rd, 2020 CA ballot.

Team prizes were awarded for projects that are the:

• Most accessible
• Most innovative
• Most data-licious

Individual prizes were also be awarded to the participants who demonstrated great collegiality, perseverance, and high engagement throughout the Challenge. This included providing helpful and supportive feedback and resources to other participants and teams on the Slack workspace, during the Showcase, and during other Challenge-related activities.

Expectations

The goal of this challenge is to support data literacy and explore data visualization applications to promote quantitatively informed civic dialogue. The emphasis of this challenge is on the process of working with data to uncover insights and providing an experience for applying data science to address real-world challenges. Your project and data visualization can encompass anything related to the ballot initiative, but this challenge will not support political agendas.

Full transparency of the data, code, outputs and interpretations is expected from all participants. In addition:

• Projects must use at least one publicly available dataset.
• All data visualizations must be reproducible. 

Teams must provide access to all materials used to produce their data visualization through a public GitHub repository. Best practices are expected for the organization of the repository, which should include all data, code, and outputs, along with a detailed readME explaining the files and links to the source datasets. 

For both the Showcase and Webinar presentations, teams should explain their data visualization, and highlight the process used for its development. At a minimum this presentation should include: 

• Brief overview of the issue (your the research question) and its relevance for the given ballot initiative;
• Where and how the data were obtained;
• What tools, technologies, and techniques were used to analyze and visualize the data;
• How they interpreted those findings;
• What the data illuminates about a given issue pertaining to the ballot initiative;
• Limitations of the source data or resulting visualization for understanding the issue

This Challenge provides an opportunity to learn and practice the process of developing a data science project. For the Showcase and Webinar, teams are encouraged to share any challenges they faced developing the project, how they overcame those challenges, and ask for suggestions and advice from others. 

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