IT pros to crunch data for non-profits at Atlassian HQ

A group of IT professionals are gathering this weekend to help not-for-profit organisations use data in sophisticated ways only the private sector would normally be able to do.

Goodwill Analytics will be held this Saturday and Sunday at Atlassian’s headquarters in downtown Sydney, with the Refugee Council of Australia, Shepherd Centre and Hello Sunday Morning hoping to benefit.

Volunteers, not just from Atlassian but from all walks of the IT industry, will be pooled together to solve each non-profit organisation’s chosen set of problems. The NGOs will provide the raw data, whereupon the volunteers will contribute their skills.

Refugee Council of Australia will look to improve its CRM database and processing; Alcohol awareness group Hello Sunday Morning will seek the best model for risk reduction; and the Shepherd Centre, an organisation that helps hearing impaired children, wants to improve donor management and clinical predictions.

The event was overwhelmed with registrations when it initially made the call-out for volunteers.

“We were oversubscribed within a week,” organiser and Atlassian Atlassian product analyst Alvin Yeap told CRN. “The response from the Sydney data science and analytics community has been fantastic, and it's clear that there's a strong desire among us to apply our skills to good social causes.”

Yeap said that participant numbers were capped to make the first event manageable, and that about 25 volunteers have been confirmed for this weekend.

“Atlassian has been very generous in allowing us to use the venue for this cause, but this is not an Atlassian event,” Yeap told CRN. “We have only three Atlassians participating, including myself. We have tried hard to create a good mix of volunteers from different backgrounds from academia to consulting, from new graduates to those with decades of experience.”

Goodwill Analytics is the brainchild of a group of friends - Yeap, Veda business analysts Elinna Yao and Beau Prendergast, CommBank engineer Konstantinos Servis and JobAdder content writer Laura Hanrahan.

The Australian movement was inspired by DataKind, an overseas organisation that brings together data pros to work on projects for “social change” organisations. CRN understands the organisers of Goodwill Analytics initially approached DataKind to form a Sydney chapter, but the international network had its hands full opening five other new branches.

Each of this weekend's three beneficiaries have had a ‘data ambassador’ assigned to them, acting as pre- and post-event leaders. Atlassian senior product analyst Arik Friedman is working with the Refugee Council of Australia, Veda’s Chris McKendry and Louis Ching are liaising with the Shepherd Centre, and Atlassian senior data scientist Ilias Flaounas is leading the Hello Sunday Morning project.

“When we floated the idea of Goodwill Analytics to not-for-profits, we received a lot of interest,” said Yeap. “When it came down to selecting the charities to work with on this occasion, we selected those that we felt analytics could make a substantial impact to their organisational strategy or operations.”