Civilytics

Measuring the pulse of civic life.

Policing the American University out now!

Mission

Building inclusive public analytics for government accountability.

The work to reinvigorate our democracy must begin at the local level where the public has the greatest control and barriers to collective action are the lowest. Civilytics is focusing on building the tools communities need to understand and deliberate about the performance of their local governments.

History

Civilytics Consulting is a data science consulting firm founded in 2016 by Dr. Jared E. Knowles. Civilytics has served clients at all levels of government in several policy areas including K-12 education, higher education, policing, and taxation. Civilytics Consulting focuses on building the capacity of its public institution partners to sustain analytic products after the initial work.

Recent Projects

building an enrollment projection system for a state higher education system
designing a curriculum for data analysts in education agencies
advising on the development of a statewide early warning system
auditing the source code and public impact of predictive analytics systems
creating city accountability dashboards on police performance
building an equity-focused analytic suite and dashboard for student recruitment

Recent Clients

Projects

Budget Advocacy Tools

Tools to help put the power of the purse back in the hands of the people.

Campus Policing Tookit

Using data to understand policing at your local college.

Prison Gerrymandering on Reveal

Measuring the impact of prison gerrymandering on Wisconsin’s legislature

Police Accountability Factsheets

A community by community look at policing across the United States.

Freshmen Recruitment and Admissions Intelligence System

The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) asked Civilytics to build an equity-focused tool to identify high schools …

Projecting Student Enrollment

Using GAMMs for flexible estimation

Building an Inclusive Public Analytics Platform for Police Data

A Medium post about building police analytics in public.

Police Arrest Prototype

Building police analytics in public.

Kaggle Data Science for Good - Center for Policing Equity

Center for Policing Equity (CPE) Kaggle Competition

OpenSDP

An open community for education data analysts.

R Training

Train your team in R with exactly the content you need, and none of the stuff you don’t.

Education Early Warning Systems

The Wisconsin Dropout Early Warning System I co-developed the award-winning Wisconsin Dropout Early Warning System (DEWS) during my …

Products

Mapping Admissions Prospects (MAP)

Using a powerful map interface, you can explore differences in college-readiness, and community traits, among schools nationwide.

Pricing Policing in Your City

A free tool to explore the spending priorities for your city using historical spending data on 150 U.S. cities.

Jared Knowles

President

Civilytics Consulting LLC

People

Dr. Jared Knowles is the president of Civilytics Consulting, LLC. He founded Civilytics in 2016 to pursue his passion of providing high-quality public performance metrics for government services. He also provides an array of consulting services including statistical computing, research design, and training in data analysis and R programming. He has expertise in machine learning, multilevel modeling, and other statistical analysis methods.

He formerly served as a research analyst with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. There he led the design and deployment of the Wisconsin Dropout Early Warning System (DEWS), a machine learning predictive framework available to all schools serving students grades 5-9 in the state. He also led several internal analysis efforts culminating in presenting findings to agency leadership, legislators, school leaders, teachers, and the public. He completed his PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. He was also a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences, an Institute of Education Sciences pre-doctoral training program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

He is also an avid photographer and loves to travel. Check out his personal site to see his photography and learn more about his work.