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One of our primary goals at Kariba (the team behind Open Source Observer) is to build a network of Impact Data Scientists. However, “Impact Data Scientist” isn’t a career path that currently exists. It’s not even a job description that currently exists.

This post is a first step in changing that. In it, we discuss:

1. Why we think the Impact Data Scientist is an important job of the future
2. The characteristics and job spec of an Impact Data Scientist
3. Ways to get involved if you are an aspiring Impact Data Scientist

One important caveat. This post is focused on building a network of Impact Data Scientists that serve crypto open source software ecosystems. In the long run, we hope to see Impact Data Scientists work in all sorts of domains. We are starting in crypto because there is already a strong culture around supporting open source software and decentralizing grantmaking decisions. We hope this culture of building in public and experimenting crosses over to non-crypto grantmaking ecosystems. When it does, we’d love to help build a network of Impact Data Scientists in those places too!

Over the past few months, we've been hard at work creating the infrastructure to collect and analyze impact metrics for open source projects. We're excited to announce that we're ready to start doing some new analysis on data from open source projects ... and we need your help!

This post includes some of the domains we're interested in exploring as well as an initial list of impact metrics we'd like to collect. We're looking for feedback on these metrics and suggestions for additional metrics we should consider. We're also looking for contributors to help us apply these impact metrics.

Get Involved​

If you'd like to get involved, here's what to do:

1. Apply to join the Data Collective. It only takes a few minutes. We'll review, and reach out to schedule an onboarding call.
2. Join our Discord server and say hello.
3. Get inspiration from our Colab directory of starter notebooks for impact metrics. We also have of them in our Insights repo if you prefer to run them locally.
4. Consult our docs and especially our impact metric spec as you prepare your analysis.

The rest of this post includes more details on the types of impact metrics we're interested in.