How We work – Hitchhiker's Guide to CorrelAid

Some thoughts on how we work internally.

Visit our monthly onboarding call to learn about how CorrelAid activities look like, how the organization is structured, and how you can get involved.

Our goal with CorrelAid is to democratize the potential of Data Science. In practice, we achieve this by supporting a network of over many data enthusiasts in Germany, by giving them the opportunity to grow, and by organizing pro-bono data science projects for civil society. But how do we work internally? This is an overview of how we organize ourselves at CorrelAid, how we work and which principles we follow.

Our Code of Conduct and Code of Ethics

CorrelAid operates on a Code of Ethics developed by the community, which guides our project decisions, shared goals, and desired interactions. This is also summarized in our Code of Conduct.

Our goal is to empower data analysts and support collaboration with civil society through responsible and ethical data practices. In addition to respectful and non-discriminatory behavior, we value transparency, pragmatism, and self-determination.

Our Impact

Our goal is to strengthen civil society and foster social engagement. To achieve this, we pursue three core impact goals:

1. Empower non-profit organizations to use data in a critical, reflective, and responsible way to better achieve their missions.

2. Enable effective engagement that creates value for non-profits while fostering self-efficacy, learning, and meaningful contribution among volunteer data scientists.

3. Support and promote the participation of marginalized groups within data science, advancing inclusion, equity, and diverse perspectives.

Our Organization

We are formed as an association ("Verein" in German). In practice, however, the official organs of the association only have a secondary role. Instead, most of the structures we work in are informal, always potentially changing and ad-hoc.

Structure

The Assocation

CorrelAid is legally organized as an association, whose core consists of its members, who come together at the annual general meeting. In addition to the general meeting, the board determines the strategic direction of the association throughout the year. The ethics commission reviews the association’s activities with regard to general ethical values and becomes active upon request.

The Remote Office Team

The Remote Office Team consists of several full-time and part-time employees who support volunteer work, and implement various projects in the operational areas of education, data4good projects, and community. You can drop a message to the team via [email protected].

The Volunteer Community

We organize the volunteer community according to the crowd-crew-core principle:

• The crowd is made up of all the people who are part of our network and keep up to date with our work via our newsletters or Slack.

• Everyone who helps shape our activities is part of our crew. In addition to the data4good projects, this could be the data dialogues with civil society, various data literacy courses, participation in the mentoring program and much more.

• The core consists of the people who take responsibility for preparing and organzing the offers of CorrelAid: such as the board, the team leads, and our ethics committee.

Communication

Slack Workspace

All our online communication takes place in our Slack Workspace. We have a channel for all important topics in which we organize our work. In addition, there are channels for technical questions and a channel for interesting links and projects. Our work takes place almost exclusively in public Slack channels. If you want to join our Slack Workspace, just drop a short email to [email protected] or visit our monthly onboarding call.

Slack Workspace

Newsletter

Our volunteer newsletter provides you with all the relevant information about what's currently happening at CorrelAid and what volunteering opportunities are available. You can subscribe to it here.

Newsletter