Insights Report 2022

Publication date: 2022

The primary mission of the World Data League (WDL) is to create a hub of open knowledge on data for social impact. To do so, the team organized a  data competition that gathers data scientists from all over the globe to solve socially-oriented challenges focused on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

In 2022, the second edition of WDL took place with seven challenges around the topic of Data-Driven Communities, focusing specifically on SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and SDG 15 (Life on Earth).

Like in 2021, the competition's outcome is open-sourced proof-of-concept algorithms that can help develop sustainable communities. The evaluation process was optimized not only for the technical evaluation but also for understanding the problem, analyzing the datasets, identifying possible applications of the algorithms in the organizations' day-to-day, and measuring a potential social impact.

In this edition, the novel framework for Social Impact Measurement was developed by the WDL team and introduced into the competition. The goal of this framework was to help define the product around the model being developed and estimate the resulting outcome.

In this document, the authors summarized the teams' insights and findings for each of the challenges, organized into five main categories: Data, Methods and Techniques, Main Insights from Data, Product, and Social Impact.