We Count

The Project

Funder: 

Project Website: https://wecount.inclusivedesign.ca/

Description: 

We Count is a community-driven project to address the inherent bias against small minorities and outliers in artificial intelligence and data analytics. Disability often places you at the margins of a data set. More and more critical decisions are made and automated using data. Current artificial intelligence can automate and amplify existing discrimination.

The We Count community is addressing this by:

  • making sure people with lived experience of disability can participate in shaping data science,
  • addressing data gaps and biases,
  • co-designing protections against data abuse and misuse, and
  • co-creating more equitable decision supports.

Partners

Organizations that have expressed interest and/or commitment to participating are: 

  • Canadian Association of Community Living
  • Centre for Independent Living in Toronto
  • DisAbled Women’s Network
  • Canadian Council of the Blind
  • Canadian Hearing Society
  • Canadian Hard of Hearing Society
  • Canadian National Institute for the Blind
  • ARCH Disability Law Centre
  • British Columbia Aboriginal Network on Disability Society
  • Communication Disabilities Access Canada
  • Council of Canadians with Disabilities
  • Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
  • Disabled Peoples’ International
  • Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion and Society
  • Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario
  • NEADS (National Education Association of Disabled Students)
  • Ontario Federation for Cerebral Palsy, and
  • StopGap

Goals of Project

  • List of data science tools along with assessment of accessibility
  • Resources for marginalized groups looking to get into artificial intelligence
  • Resources for C-suite roles looking to apply artificial intelligence to their organization
  • Resources for researchers looking to apply more inclusive/accessible artificial intelligence

Milestones

Milestone #1: Co-design approaches and processes to address accessibility challenges, data science barriers and data gaps for persons with disabilities. (July 2019-December 2021)

Milestone #2: Address accessibility barriers in data science tools and biases against persons with disabilities in machine learning and automated decision processes. (October 2019-March 2022)

Milestone #3: Develop accessible processes and standards for data governance and security (July 2019-June 2020)

Milestone #4: Credential and certify inclusive data science training (October 2019-March 2022)

WeCount Website

The production deployment: https://wecount.inclusivedesign.ca/

The development deployment: https://dev--wecount.netlify.app/

The Github repository: https://github.com/inclusive-design/wecount.inclusivedesign.ca

Website Design: Figma Doc

WeCount website release steps

General Information and Browser Support

Architecture Rationale

Accessibility Map

The umbrella document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a4emmifag7OVefDvTRbFf7ck_AwZziaGlotvhL-0-RI/

The map deploy alone: https://build-covid.netlify.app/

The map deploy on the WeCount website: https://wecount.inclusivedesign.ca/map/

The data repository of COVID assessment centres: https://github.com/inclusive-design/covid-assessment-centres/

The source code repository: https://github.com/inclusive-design/covid-data-monitor/

Brainstorming on Accessibility Map of COVID-19 Assessment Centres

Evaluate node.js testing frameworks

Inverted Wordle

The website: https://inverted-wordles.netlify.app/

The source code repository: https://github.com/inclusive-design/inverted-wordles

Inverted Word Clouds Architecture

Evaluation of word cloud libraries

Speculation on Inverted Wordles Algorithms

The Pluralistic Data Infrastructure

The source code repository for the Pluralistic Data Infrastructure: https://github.com/inclusive-design/forgiving-data/

The source code repository for Github Operation API: https://github.com/inclusive-design/git-ops-api

Antranig gave a talk on Dec 3 for CIFAR - slides available at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wF8EHXc8_h9gREwEzVzYg7gd_vMnPwPCWJRnossOTXw/edit

Personal Data Server

The source code repository: https://github.com/fluid-project/personal-data-server

W3C Community Group

Summary: W3C Portable Personal Data Preferences Community Group

Data Science Tools Evaluation

Accessibility Test Plan for Python Download Package for Mac

Designing Proof and Evidence Co-Design

In fall 2021, a series of three co-design sessions were held on the topic of "Designing Proof and Evidence with Minorities and Outlier Data".

Co-Design Activities

Co-Design Outcomes

Resources

We Count Website Summary

Communication

Meeting notes (link): All meeting Notes

Communication channel or platform (link): Matrix Channel

Project Resource

Data Science Tools

Add a relevant Link for Review/Curation by Resources Team (internal access only)

Add a file to the resources to review folder on Sharepoint (internal access only)

References

Readings

Literature