savgore

I’m building the UK’s ‘big data’ charity with some awesome co-trustees and volunteers. We undertake big data projects in service of human flourishing, collect and synthesize datasets from hostile actors or freedom of information requests, and collaborate with other charities to build useful things that facilitate effective coordination.

The context is that I co-run the UK’s largest and most active landlord review platform ‘Marks out of Tenancy’, and the data we aggregated and ended up being able to host and query did a number of incredibly high impact things:

- our system for identifying how many people lived in a property started getting used to find victims of human trafficking - our system for checking for HMO licensing got picked up by councils to detect 100% of illegal or rogue landlords in the scan area, as well as detecting illegal short lets. - our longitudinal data collection on housing conflict between tenants and landlords directly led to increasing the rent repayment order threshold in the renters rights act from 12 months to 24 months.

So after seeing how much data is out there ready to be used for advocacy - but just left untapped by a profit driven sector, and after years of experience as ‘activist data practitioners’ or whatever you’d want to call it, we decided to launch something that could be a home for those projects in the spaces we’re in over here in the UK.

We’ve already got some awesome projects underway and we’re excited to see how year 0 goes for us!

https://pistolas.co.uk/work-that-need-not-be/

We’re working directly with partner housing unions and charities in Britain and Ireland to build the first central database of rogue landlords and estate agents. Users can search an address and see if it’s marked as rogue/dangerous by the local union, as well as whether you can expect to see your deposit returned, maintenance, communication - etc.

After renting for close to a decade, it’s the same old problems with no accountability. We wanted to change this, and empower tenants to share their experiences freely and easily with one another.

We’re launching in November, and I’m very excited to announce our partner organisations! We know this relies on a network effect to work, and we’re hoping to run it as a social venture. I welcome any feedback.