I am simply glad I got through Datakind DC Datadive #data4good experience, feeling very uncomfortable being surrounded by 'real' data analysts and programmers. I told a few people how rusty my quantitative and programming skills were, even after Jake Porway tried to collectively convince us that someone like me was still welcome. I was lucky not to encounter intimidation, first meeting a science journalist from the Huffington Post who traveled from New York to satisfy his hunger for data immersion. He has a degree in history and taught himself programming. Though people tend to group with their own peeps in this event, there were many strangers who made connections and accomplished a few projects with impressive findings. Who knew Evgeny and I ended up looking at (and web scraping) changes in rice prices in Indonesia over time through a retailer's website? I then said confidently in writing:
- Between Aug 2010 and today, prices of rice at the retail store increased more drastically than world prices.
- Today, consumers pay almost four times the price of world's rice commodity price at the retail store (middle-class grocery store). Curious case!
- We found some news articles as early as December 2012 where the president of Indonesia ordered BULOG (the National Logistical Supply Organization) to stabilize the price of rice, along with soybeans and sugar. This confirmed that our findings are a national concern in Indonesia at the moment. Small victories, indeed! Putting myself in discomfort that would typically threaten my confidence and finding myself satisfied with another opportunity to connect the dots (my buried love for numbers and chart with analyzing 'big data' to help ourselves better understand complexities).
Of course, I cannot help but link it to my venture, Sarjana.co.id. Questions started popping up in my mind: Does one meta-site really change students' decisions in pursuing higher education?
Do students really invest in "scraping" for information which determines their future?
How many more times will they visit Sarjana.co.id after our first visit at their schools?
What does increasing Twitter followers and Facebook fans mean?
Would universities see any value in working with Sarjana.co.id, based on the answers to the above?
These questions were the same 'kind' of questions people at the Datadive were asking themselves at the World Bank that weekend. It was self-scrutiny. The World Bank provided data and allowed data divers analyze, for example, overhead costs in the monstrous multilateral structure and their relation to projects' budgets.
Scrutiny is seen as putting people down, but if you watch Shark Tank, scrutiny is reality and it does build you up (depending on how you see it). For starters and movers out there, self-scrutiny is taking scrutiny to the next level, where we question our motives and steps, not because we lose ourselves, tangled in problems or complexities, but because we strive for something. Striving for addressing problems at a societal level, instead of imposing solutions that we think are appropriate. We have to many of those who impose things like laws and educational curriculum that don't ultimately affect them.
Self-scrutiny is definitely a path to critical thinking. Education is a sector full of 'pretty, cheery' things, where all good things added up seem to be good -- scholarships, online education, foreign professors, international curriculum. Sarjana.co.id is really taking a position in the midst of an education system that is nearly 'obsolete' (thanks to Sugata Mitra's definition of education's obsolescence, http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_challenge). If Sarjana.co.id does not take the unpopular path of critical thinking, it's going to be cheering for the wrong team: the reluctant, yet defensive bunch in the hijacked system.
So how should Sarjana.co.id hack the system?
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