Save the Data: The Georgetown Community Unites to Preserve Public Information

By: Sara Bach, Spring 2025 MDI Communications Assistant

On February 13th, more than 60 volunteers, including students, faculty, and researchers, gathered in the Georgetown Ethics Lab with a shared mission to save public data from potential deletion. The Save the Data event, hosted by the Massive Data Institute (MDI), brought together a diverse group committed to helping the research community by preserving open data at risk of being deleted.

The event welcomed participants of all experience levels, from first-time coders to skilled Python users, creating an inclusive environment in which everyone could contribute. Through  in-depth training in web scraping, creating metadata, and identifying vulnerable public data resources, MDI ensured all participants could engage effectively in preserving open data.  

Lisa Singh, the Director of MDI, highlighted the gravity of preserving public data not only as a matter of access, but also as essential for advancing research and informing policy:

“Data helps us hypothesize and test theories about what works in our society and what needs fixing. It helps us predict what may happen under different conditions and the implications of different interventions. If we have no data for research and policy development, then our ability to understand why decisions are being made and the impact of different decisions decreases significantly.”

Georgetown’s Interim President Robert M. Groves showed institutional support for the mission and emphasized the critical role of public data in sustaining a healthy democracy.

Over the course of the evening, volunteers scraped and archived more than 30 public datasets, created metadata for each one, and identified many additional datasets in need of preservation. The volunteers came from a wide range of professional and academic backgrounds, motivated by how data preservation intersected with their own fields of work and study.

Seniha Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana, the Associate Director and Assistant Professor of the Practice in Georgetown’s MA Program in Conflict Resolution, viewed the event as directly beneficial to the courses she teaches on women, peace, and security. Saving data related to gender, intersectionality, and DEI provides security if the data are made unavailable in the future.

Similarly, Cara Jackson, a Senior Research Professional and former Principal Associate at Abt Global, underscored the practical stakes of data preservation as an important part of her daily work: 

“I work for a research firm. Obviously we use a lot of data, and we’re very concerned about the fact that it keeps getting taken down. People need information to make good decisions. We already invested money in obtaining this data, it costs a lot of money to collect and maintain, and it’s kind of wasteful to just make it not available to people.”

Volunteers worked individually but also collaborated throughout the night, helping others troubleshoot and track data down when they could not be found where they should have been. MDI Technical Manager Julie Dang reflected on the event’s success:

“The participation and energy in the room at this event was a testament to the effectiveness of the Open Data movement of the previous two decades, which democratized data knowledge, access, and tools. This event was really effective as an opportunity for participants to grow their data skills in the three tracks of identifying, documenting and harvesting data for backup.”

Through initiatives such as this, Georgetown and MDI aim to cultivate a community that values data accessibility and preservation and understands how vital accessible data are for informing research and policy-making. Upon the event’s conclusion, participants left with newfound skills and understanding of data preservation that may inspire continued engagement beyond the Ethics Lab.

“One antidote to feeling hopeless is building your power through skills and knowledge. And technology and data skills are especially powerful, especially now,” said Dang. “I hope they continue to seek out opportunities to grow and use their data skills as a way to exercise their power.”

This event was supported by a coalition of partnering organizations, including the American Educational Research Association, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, Georgetown’s Ethics Lab, the Departments of Sociology and Computer Science, Georgetown University Library, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, and the Urban Institute.