CT Data Collaborative Receives Entrepreneur Award

The Connecticut Data Collaborative (CTData) has been selected to receive the 2020 Connecticut Entrepreneur Award for Education, it was announced Monday at the annual awards ceremony. CTData was the first-place finisher in community voting in the education category.

The Connecticut Data Collaborative (CTData) is a statewide public-private partnership that advocates for the public availability of open and accessible data. CTData strives for informed decision-making across Connecticut, empowering an ecosystem of data users by democratizing access to public data and building data literacy skills.

CTData creates interactive data portals, platforms, and stories for users to explore; teaches data skills through workshops; consults with organizations on their specific data needs; and supports a community of data users through events and conferences.

“We are honored to have earned this recognition, particularly because it was powered by our standing in the community,” said Michelle Riordan-Nold, Executive Director of the Connecticut Data Collaborative. “We strive diligently to achieve better-informed decision making in the public and private sector, to expand the use and understanding of data, and to facilitate public access to data. We look forward to additional collaborations to further those objectives.”

The CT Entrepreneur Awards celebrate Connecticut’s leading entrepreneurs, ventures, and ecosystem elements that support them. The awards are a product of the CT Entrepreneur Event Organizers consortium, an all-volunteer cooperative effort of people and organizations that host and facilitate entrepreneur-facing events in Connecticut. The CT Entrepreneur Awards have been held annually since 2017.

Earlier this month, CTData earned a $30,850 Hartford Foundation Civic Engagement Grant to develop a public data platform designed to provide organizations seeking to increase voter registration and voting in Connecticut with the data necessary to more effectively target their efforts. The new data platform is currently being finalized, and is set to launch later this month at www.ctdata.org.

CTData is also the lead organization for the State of Connecticut in the U.S. Census Bureau’s State Data Center Program. More than 200 data sets are now accessible to the public on the CTData website, including a wide array of subjects and policy categories. More information is available at www.ctdata.org