DATACON!

This fundraising campaign is dedicated to financial support of the DATACON! project - a project aiming to promote fact-based public discussion on topics where no consensus exists.

Our society is losing the ability to discuss such issues. We each hold our own beliefs, whatever they may be, and we no longer want to hear the reasoning of the other side.

Perhaps the most visible example is the dispute over COVID-19 measures.

Some claim that thousands of studies prove the measures saved millions of lives; others argue that such studies are worthless if they do not make the underlying data publicly available. No genuine open discussion is taking place. Any criticism of the measures is often dismissed outright as misinformation or conspiracy theory. But this approach does not help anything; on the contrary, it only creates fertile ground for conspiracies.

And this is where DATACON! comes in.

Our goal is to bring experts from both sides to the same table for a discussion based on open data.

DATACON! is designed as a data analysis competition. The data will not be provided only to selected individuals. They will not be analyzed solely by supporters or solely by opponents of the measures. Anyone with the necessary skills can analyze them, regardless of which side they are on. Even the evaluation of the results involves people from both sides of the debate.

We believe that the only real weapon against conspiracy theories is openness. That is why we are opening both the data and the analytical results for public discussion.

You can find the results of the first year at www.soutezdatacon.cz. We, however, want to continue with further topics and new datasets. Will you help us?