Hiring: Founding Data Analyst for Civic Abundance

This is a unique opportunity to lead a new Roote Project, Civic Abundance.

We believe cities can be beautiful, safe places with abundant housing, amazing education, and no poverty. Civic information and coordination is upstream of all these issues.

Your job is to create information and coordination infrastructure to help cities thrive, starting with a community dashboard that surfaces important metrics for San Francisco.

I. What is Roote?

Roote (www.roote.co) is an educational hub and for-public startup studio accelerating the personal and collective transformation necessary for humanity's transition to the Wisdom Age.

1. Our educational hub runs the Roote Fellowship, a podcast, and a newsletter.
2. Our startup studio launches Roote Projects, ambitious projects which catalyze systems-level change for a wiser world.

II. Role Overview

Civic Abundance is building information and coordination infrastructure to help cities (and eventually entire societies) thrive. You are responsible for catalyzing that infrastructure.

This position is extremely entrepreneurial. We’re looking for a relentlessly resourceful teammate who learns and executes quickly.

If you're interested in leading something new that will maximize your rate-of-learning, please apply!

What You'll Do

• Solve the 1st customer problem: what’s really happening in my city? Research and build the initial community dashboard that 5% of SF residents check every morning. (15% of Taiwanese residents use Polis monthly.)
  • As an example, there's the Bartholomew Community Dashboard and the Salina Community Dashboard.
  • We are presenting a first version of this at Graph Day on June 2, 2022.
• Solve the 2nd customer problem: how can I help? Work with community groups to showcase key metrics, highlight problems, crowdsource solutions, and mobilize work on those solutions.
  • Build a self-organizing community of 100+ researchers who co-create a local Wikipedia for daily urban life.
  • Create Race To The Top dynamics between SF and other cities to improve their metrics.
  • Network and collaborate with other projects and communities around civic abundance: NewPublic, Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, Effective Government California, RadicalXChange, Institute for Progress

You will do all of this in a network-first way: by building community and collaborating with existing communities. If you help other orgs push the frontier of civic tech, that's great!

After 1 year, success looks like: you’ve created a community dashboard that is checked daily by 5% of SF residents. You’ve catalyzed a dedicated community of 100+ folks who building off of this dashboard to showcase key metrics, highlight problems, crowdsource solutions, and work on those solutions.

After 3 years, success looks like: SF has made counterfactual progress on at least 3 KPIs that wouldn’t have happened without the tool. 25+ cities around the world are using similar dashboards and action plans.

You May Be a Fit if You Have

• Experience creating customer-facing dashboards using D3, ChartJS, etc. (Or want to do so!)
• Experience with working in politics, public policy, and other forms of civic tech. (Or want to do so!)
• Experience organizing communities of researchers around knowledge production. (Or want to do so!)
• A love for building community.
• Proven ability to be a self-starter capable of driving results without significant supervision.
• A strong bias toward concrete action. You should often ask: "Why can't this be done sooner?"
• A strong bias towards ambition. You should often ask: "Is this the most ambitious plan we could come up with?"

Even if not all of these apply to you, we'd still love to consider your application, particularly if you'd like to learn more of these. Studies show that you can be considered for a role even if many of a job posting's listed qualifications don't apply to you. We evaluate all applications holistically.

Why You Might Be Excited About Us

• You get to be weird and creative. This is not a traditional VC firm, tech company, online school, or academic research hub.
• You want to work with us. Here is our team. And here are our How To Work With Me Manuals.
• We have a great network. You want to work with global leaders and ambitious frontier people.
• You are aligned with Roote's guiding mission and values.
• We have an extremely flexible leave policy and provide benefits including full health, dental, and vision coverage.

To learn more about Roote, check out our website, which includes our report on Building The Wisdom Age and our illustrated piece on Marriage Counseling With Capitalism.

III. Logistics

Type: Full-time.

Time Expectation: Start as soon as possible.

Location: We are a hybrid org based in the SF Bay Area. Since Civic Abundance aims to improve cities worldwide with an initial focus on San Francisco, we’d prefer someone based in the SF Bay Area. We are open to remote for exceptional candidates, in which case you'd join us for quarterly offsites.

Compensation: The starting salary is $85,000. This is a founding position at an early stage organization. We aim to have all salaries at Roote in the six-figure range by 2023.

Apply here (same link as the apply button): https://apply.workable.com/rooteco/j/F03B0753FE/apply/