Data-Driven Policy Making

Data Governance

MDI is working towards secure, responsible use of data for research and evaluation. MDI shares and creates standards, guides, and tools to make good data governance easier. Many projects struggle negotiating agreements, accessing appropriate data, and conducting analyses without sacrificing security or privacy. MDI promotes standards, best practices, and fosters community among data intermediaries, data owners, researchers, data users, and policymakers. MDI also maintains a directory of data intermediaries, along with guides and standards that support sound data governance.

Population Measurement

MDI applies academic innovations in data linkage to help state agencies and governments build capacity to measure their entire population and its characteristics using administrative data. MDI is connecting state administrators to resources, technical documentation, and legal context needed to link across state programs to benchmark their populations as well as provide resources and tools to measure and assess the quality of the 2020 Decennial Census.

Civil Justice

Today, involvement in the civil justice system is more common than ever before. Individuals with low incomes increasingly experience legal problems stemming from unemployment, health needs and medical debt, housing instability, family changes, and credit card debt. Yet, each institution in the civil justice system collects and stores this data in different ways. The Civil Justice Data Commons (CJDC) Project aims to create a secure, robust repository of civil legal data, gathered from courts, legal service providers, and other civil law institutions, that will enable stakeholders, researchers, and the public to better understand the civil legal system in the United States.