Insights Report 2023

Publication date: 2023

The World Data League (WDL) strives to enable cities and communities to
leverage data for social impact, adding to an ever-growing repository of open
knowledge centering around the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development
Goals (SDG).
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The third edition of the WDL flagship competition took place in the spring of
2023 and brought together over 100 participants from all over the world to
focus on three high-impact challenges proposed by cities in Portugal and the
Netherlands.

In each stage of the competition, a different SDG was in the spotlight: SDG 11
(Sustainable Cities and communities), SDG 14 (Life below water), and SDG 7
(Affordable and clean energy).

Our goal is to disseminate this knowledge openly to facilitate sustainable
communities all around the globe. In this spirit, evaluations in the WDL competition go far beyond strictly technical aspects and metrics optimization. Our evaluation matrix includes the understanding of data stakeholder’s needs, concern for data quality, deep exploratory analysis, discussion of model comparison and selection, creation of a creative solution aimed at the end user and measuring the impact of the implementation, taking into account interpretability and fairness of the data product created.
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In this document, the authors summarized the teams’ insights and findings for
each challenge, organized into five main categories: Data, Methods and Techniques, Main Insights from Data, Product, and Social Impact.