INDIGO Hack and Learn
The International Network for Data on Impact and Government Outcomes (INDIGO) is a community of peers with an interest in sharing data about the design, implementation and evaluation of outcome-based projects. INDIGO's objective is to support the use of quality data by policymakers who are addressing complex social problems. To complement our INDIGO peer learning group, we hold a bi-annual hackathon-style, "Hack and Learn" event.
About the Hack and Learn
The idea of this Hack-and-Learn Event is to bring together policymakers, who can frame specific questions, and coders, who can answer those questions with data. Harnessing skills and experiences from a diverse pool of actors, we provide a space for learning and community building around the use of data in the field and an opportunity to solve problems, co-produce and make better sense of the use of data. Both policymakers and coders are invited to work with the INDIGO database system and datasets. Each Hack and Learn session will result in new visualisations to answer the questions of policymakers. At the end of the event, a blog and/or a report on the social outcomes data use will be written to summarise the learning outputs.
You don't have to be an expert coder or a policymaker to attend. You might be both or you might be neither. Novices welcome!
Our bi-annual Hack-and-Learn event is designed to give anyone interested in learning more about the use of data in the field of social outcomes a chance to connect with others and work on a real-life project. For the eighth edition of our Hack and Learn, we will address a challenge about the possibility of including AI and ChatGPT in the day-to-day processes of data extraction and data entry for the Impact Bond Dataset.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Our bi-annual Hack-and-Learn event is designed to give anyone interested in learning more about the use of data in the field of social outcomes a chance to connect with others and work on a real-life project. For the seventh edition of our Hack and Learn, we will attempt at understanding the nature of funding provided to impact bond projects and work on rethinking the data model and designing more complex data visualisations that can show how projects' achievements compare not to one, but to several targets.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Our bi-annual Hack-and-Learn event is designed to give anyone interested in learning more about the use of data in the field of social outcomes a chance to connect with others and work on a real-life project. For the sixth edition of our Hack and Learn, we worked with analysing and populating set of impact bond projects where cost data is publicly available and also, analysed the measurement framework - comprising of the choice of metric to track impact, evaluation method to capture the metric, and design of payment structure tied to the chosen metric - using the INDIGO Impact Bond Dataset and drew suitable trends and insights.
This spring's Hack-and-Learn sessions were co-hosted by INSPER in Brazil and Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Our bi-annual Hack-and-Learn event is designed to give anyone interested in learning more about the use of data in the field of social outcomes a chance to connect with others and work on a real-life project. For the fifth edition of our Hack and Learn, we addressed a list of challenges related with our Impact Bond Dataset spreadsheet, outcomes-based education projects, creating a platform to accelerate the design and development of impact bonds, and designing a dashboard for the INSPER outcomes-based contracts dataset.
This summer's Hack-and-Learn sessions were co-hosted by INSPER in Brazil.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
For the Spring Hack and Learn event, we harnessed skills and experiences from a diverse pool of actors and provide a space for learning and community building around the use of data and an opportunity to solve problems, co-produce and make better sense of the use of data.
The Hack-and-Learn was a two-week online event where participants had the chance to choose from a selection of data-related challenges set by our team at the Government Outcomes Lab and our partners. You can find more information about the challenges here.
This Spring's Hack-and-Learn sessions was supported by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. After the event, participants co-authored a blog with their reflections and learnings from these sessions.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
For 2021’s second Hack and Learn event, we met with our diverse community of policymakers, researchers, data enthusiast and practitioners, and worked together to address seven challenges.
The first challenge was about creating a project pipeline dataset. This dataset would have data on upcoming projects with outcomes focus across the world. Other challenges explored pairs of pilot and scale-up projects to understand what are the factors that indicate that a particular project is scalable, looked at the connections between social outcomes metrics and SDGs, and built a categorisation for outcomes-based projects (‘the alphabet soup’ challenge). Some participants preferred to looked at the inflow of philanthropic funds in India and the effect of COVID-19 pandemic in Indian not-for-profit organisations. Finally, one challenge was focused on how to use financial innovation to realign incentives towards public good medicine.
This event was co-hosted by Insper Metricis, the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (University of Cape Town) and the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (Ashoka University).
After the event, participants and challenge leaders wrote a Technical and Learning Report about their experiences and suggestions to improve future editions of this event. They presented this report at the November 2021 INDIGO peer learning session.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
For 2021's first Hack and Learn event in March, we invited policymakers, data analysts and other representatives of the public and private sectors to join us in tackling pressing questions in the field of social outcomes.
Participants learnt about the basic elements of outcomes-based contracts, the pressing issues and challenges within the field, and were introduced to our new database and definitions. Policymakers, NGO representatives, citizen advocates and researchers were invited to join a group of fellow counterparts in the sector to debate the pressing concerns social outcomes contracts should strive to solve as well as potential ways to solve them. Coders and data analysts joined a team of fellow coders from around the globe, use open-source tools, such as Gephi or Plotly, and open data to explore one of 8 challenge areas.
The event was co-hosted by Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, INSPER, University of Cape Town’s Bertha Centre and Ashoka University’s Centre for Social Impact & Philanthropy. The event was sponsored by our partners at UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.
After the event, participants and challenge leaders wrote a Technical and Learning Report about their experiences and suggestions to improve future editions of this event.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
The first Hack and Learn event was in September 2020. We invited policymakers, data analysts and other representatives of the public and private sectors to tackle pressing questions in the field of social outcomes.
We worked with three challenges. The first group produced a set of data visualisations about the network of organisations involved in the impact bond ecosystem. The second group used the data from our Impact Bond Dataset to link social outcomes metrics and Sustainable Development Goals (see our prototype Sankey diagram) and the last one created prototype data visualisations for social investors or fund managers. Most of these developments are now part of our INDIGO pages.
We co-hosted this event together with the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (University of Cape Town) and the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation (Georgetown University).
Listen to the audio recording of the session.
Interested? Have Feedback?
We will provide updates, including a call for participant coders and policy makers via the INDIGO email list. We are also open to comments and suggestions on the above session sequencing and agendas. To join the email list or provide feedback, please email indigo@bsg.ox.ac.uk.