
Launch HN: OurWorldInData (YC W19 Nonprofit) – Data on World’s Largest Problems - Hannah_OWID
Hi HN!<p>We’re Hannah, Esteban, Jaiden and Max, the founders of Our World in Data (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;OurWorldInData.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;OurWorldInData.org</a>). We’re a nonprofit in the YC W19 batch.<p>Our World in Data is a website that shows how and why global living conditions and the earth&#x27;s environment are changing. Is the world becoming more violent? Is an end to poverty possible? It&#x27;s hard to know because daily news focuses on negative single events, and misses long-lasting changes that reshape the world.<p>We’re a group of researchers from the University of Oxford trying to solve this problem. We bring together data and research from many different sources often buried under jargon in static, outdated documents. We present a global perspective on living conditions and environmental change through interactive data visualizations and short explainers.<p>Max started Our World in Data in 2013 whilst working as a researcher at the University of Oxford. The project was born from a frustration that we are so poorly informed about how the world is changing—we fail to notice the important developments shaping our world and are not aware what is possible for the future. It has now evolved into a full-time project with a small team of researchers and web developers (we’ll be looking for a new web developer this week!). We’re all driven by the same motivation: to make sure data and research on how the world is changing is free and accessible for everyone.<p>We cover many topics, ranging from poverty to health, environment, energy, education, and violence. Our data and analysis are available at global, regional and country levels. And we try to provide the longest-term data we can, often going back many decades or centuries.<p>We average more than 1M users per month; these range from policymakers to journalists, academics to school teachers. But we’ve also had some use cases that took us by surprise: To many readers it’s unexpected to see that the world has made substantial progress in important aspects and psychologists have recently told us that they use our website to help patients with depression and anxiety. We did not expect this use of our work at all and asked them for more details. One of them explained: “Facts can be a powerful weapon against fear, a gloomy worldview, learned helplessness. So I help clients find facts at Our World in Data.”<p>We usually work remotely, because we are not all based in the same country—this is the first time that we were able to find a 3-month window of time to move to California and work together.<p>We come from a university environment and applied to YC because we wanted learn from the startup and the technology world. The work at YC and the contact with the partners and other founders have definitely given us an entirely new perspective on how to work.<p>We’re here at HN because we are sure we can learn a lot from the community here. We knew there had been HN threads on aspects of our work before – but after a recent search (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;OWID-searches-on-HN" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;OWID-searches-on-HN</a>) we had no idea there were so many. It’s amazing to see that these posts created such great discussion within the HN community.<p>Our website is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;OurWorldInData.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;OurWorldInData.org</a>. We are a non-profit and all our work is entirely free; open access research (Creative Commons licensed) and open source code. If you’re interested in supporting this with a donation to us you can do so here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;OurWorldInData.org&#x2F;Donate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;OurWorldInData.org&#x2F;Donate</a>. 
Or if you have any other queries, you can reach out at hannah@ourworldindata.org.<p>We would really appreciate any feedback you have on what we can do better. Thank you!
======
kauffj
One possible improvement is to provide a way for the community at large to
discuss/criticize possible problems with the data as well as for Our World in
Data to respond to criticisms from the public.

Recently, Bill Gates issued a Tweet demonstrating excitement for progress in
diminishing global poverty, citing Our World in Data:
[https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072](https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072)

This received substantial push back, with claims that this data is a reckless
extrapolation of sketchy sources, such as this article by Jason Hickel:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-
gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal)

Is there anything Our World in Data can do to better facilitate this
discussion, note that it is happening, or respond to criticism?

~~~
ourworldindata
A community discussion forum to discuss research would be great. I'd be
interested in hearing what you would suggest? We have discussed whether
something like StackOverflow, but for global development, would be possible. I
think we are too small for it though. If we'd build a platform we'd need a big
group of engaged contributors and we don't think we are big enough for that
yet.

I read the newspaper article and have been in a lot of contact with the
author, we agree on many points, especially that higher poverty lines are
needed to track what is happening and that it is surely not enough to look at
extreme poverty. But low poverty lines are needed so that we see what is
happening to world's poorest. One of the biggest failures of development over
the last decades is that incomes of the very poorest on the planet have not
risen: [https://voxeu.org/article/assessing-progress-poorest-new-
evi...](https://voxeu.org/article/assessing-progress-poorest-new-evidence)
This is not widely known because the extreme poverty line is not low enough to
focus on what happens to the very poorest. So overall I think it is very
important that we keep track of what happens relative to different poverty
lines (and we do [https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty-
lines](https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty-lines)) On the
particular point you emphasize, that historians have a poor understanding of
poverty and prosperity in the past I do not agree that it is a 'reckless
extrapolation of sketchy sources'. I think this is overstating the existing
uncertainties and it's not a fair description of the careful and tedious work
that historians do. And we did respond to it here
[https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-
methods](https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods) and go in some
detail of this historical work. We understand our job as providing access to
good, existing research and so our job is to understand the research that is
out there and bring it together on the web to make it possible for everyone to
understand it, and access it. A very thorough book on what we know about
poverty, including the historical decline of the share living on less than an
extremely low poverty threshold, is Martin Ravallion's 'The Economics of
Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy'. Let me know what you think!

~~~
bjelkeman-again
We have been trying to engage the international development community in
working with crowdsourcing of content in a wiki around water issues,
[https://akvopedia.org](https://akvopedia.org) It hasn’t been very successful.

I have seen efforts around using a StackOverflow model to get engagement, but
it hasn’t been successful.

The way we ended up getting content varied. We convinced those that had
content to allow us to republish it in wiki suitable format. We hired an
editor to do a lot of the work. We built in content publishing in the
Akvopedia as a way to publish results from programmes.

It is interesting how reluctant a group of professionals can be at
contributing, despite it being an appreciated source. We hear from UN
organisations HQ in New York that when they get new staff they send them to
the Akvopedia to read up on the subject. We know thousands of people read the
content, from all over the world. I meet people at conferences that used the
resource.

We specifically licensed the content to be portable to the Wikipedia, but the
Wikipedia editors we have encountered are not very helpful when trying to move
content over or linking content. The exception has been some content we have
managed to get onto Wikiversity. But even there we met some resistance.

I think it is really important that we try different methods to spread this
type of information. Something will stick at some point I am sure. Keep up the
good work.

~~~
Hannah_OWID
Thanks for sharing your experiences on this. I hadn't heard of Akvopedia
before, so it's new to me.

Agree that finding the right solution that sticks: is read by many,
consistently kept up-to-date and gets the level so detail correct/unbiased is
difficult to do.

We're trying our best to do our version of this work. It's reaching some
people, but we can always do more/better. It's really helpful to hear
experiences/responses from elsewhere which we can learn what works and
doesn't.

------
janimo
"Facts can be a powerful weapon against fear, a gloomy worldview, learned
helplessness". This is so true.

However I also notice a frequent and not so helpful use of such data, namely
as a way of countering people's legitimate complains about their current
state. It is especially concerning when the positive trends are touted as
consequences of certain public policies, even when the correlation is
questionable. There are heated online debates between the Bill
Gates/Pinker/Factfulness camp and the 'left' on the role of the free market vs
a strong state in shaping progress during the past 50 years.

How can you avoid any sort of bias creeping in the content of your site?

~~~
elefanten
Have any recommendations for good pieces related to this debate you mention?

I'm sure there are lots of heated online debates, but any good ones in mind?

~~~
janimo
The top comment in the thread has the most recent debate I know of.

------
BucketSort
This is fantastic. I've been waiting for data driven policy initiatives, and
I'm sure this is a great resource for that. Have you considered implementing a
system like Kaggle Kernels that allow people to submit further models and
analysis of the data?

~~~
Hannah_OWID
That's great to hear - we're working hard to make sure our work also reaches
many of the key people influencing policy initiatives and decisions.

That's a great suggestion - we hadn't actually thought of that in the context
of our work. But it makes sense given we have such an abundance of open-source
data.

What Kaggle Kernels do is awesome. It'd be cool to integrate this concept into
our work at some point. Thanks for the suggestion!

~~~
BucketSort
Absolutely, it would also allow people to have a conversation about the data
through various kernels and threads. As another comment said, there was some
recent controversy over some of the reports, a Kernel system would enable an
environment where people can have a data driven debate about what the data
really implies. Thanks for your work and I'm really looking forward to seeing
how it evolves!

Edit: When you provide an open platform for people to collaborate, it can be
amazing who shows up and what gets done!

------
geopsychiatry
Our World Data website is awesome. It is very generous of Hannah, Esteban,
Jaiden and Max to make it available and I can only imagine their passion. I
represent a specialist area Mental Illness/Psychiatry and have shared this
reservoir of knowledge across the globe amongst peers. Importantly it has
aided us in our creation of the CAPE Vulnerability Index which is now getting
traction across the globe in particular amongst Foreign Aid doners looking for
greater accountability for spend to outcomes. Thank you Twitter @geopsychiatry

------
teddyh
I thought that this was what
[https://www.gapminder.org/](https://www.gapminder.org/) was for, ever since
2005? And yet you don’t mention them?

~~~
Hannah_OWID
The work of Gapminder, and Hans Rosling in particular, was a major motivation
for the work we do.

In fact, Max worked a lot with Hans Rosling in the past: in this BBC
documentary on ending global poverty, for example
([https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-
poverty/](https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/)). You can
find him listed as collaborator in the sources
([https://www.gapminder.org/news/data-sources-dont-panic-
end-p...](https://www.gapminder.org/news/data-sources-dont-panic-end-
poverty/)).

As you say, Gapminder is one organization that takes data from published
datasets and communicates it to a larger audience. The Gapminder foundation
therefore has a similar mission – promoting fact-based world views, informing
people about long-term changes in living standards. But Gapminder is not
broadly focussed on global change – it does not cover violence, war, poverty,
education, environmental change, etc. – and instead more narrowly focuses on
health and demography. The areas of my own personal work: environment, food,
and energy, for example, are not extensively covered there.

In fact, for those topics that lie outside of its focus, they often rely on us
as input (you can find us referenced throughout their book 'Factfulness' for
example). And similarly for us: for long-run trends on aspects such as child
mortality or fertility rate, we reference their datasets
([https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-
mortality](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality)).

So our mission is very similar and we continue to collaborate, but our
approach slightly different. Gapminder is narrower in focus and tries to
capture a much more general audience. We go for more breadth and depth, and
target a less wide (but still large) general audience.

~~~
avip
Do you collaborate with for-profits that do cover these fields (s.a gro-
intelligence)?

------
FiatLuxDave
It would be interesting to see what adding radon would do to the section on
air pollution (arguably, radon is a form of air pollution, albeit not
particulate).

Since the current estimate in the USA is about 10,000 deaths per year
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2118410](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2118410)),
with of course, some dissent
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590909/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590909/)),
this is large enough to show up on the graph, especially for the developed
countries.

Unfortunately, getting good data on radon-related death rates is difficult, as
it must be parsed out of lung cancer rates with a number of assumptions
applied. I figure that getting good data is in your wheelhouse. If not, I
could probably put you in touch with someone at AARST or NRSB who may have
better data.

Congrats on the Launch:HN!

------
rvrabec
I like the idea of shifting to a demand-driven model. Unrelatedly, check out
[https://datausa.io/](https://datausa.io/) if you haven't. Deloitte/MIT
created a similar platform for US statistics. Doesn't seem like it's being
maintained but it looks pretty/is easy to navigate.

------
chiefalchemist
Best of luck. We need it!

That said, I'd like to suggest a book. "The Influential Mind." Long to short,
there's more to influence than objective facts.

[https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-
Other...](https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-
Others/dp/1627792651)

~~~
shishy
She gave a talk at Google, for anyone interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w)

------
toomuchtodo
> We would really appreciate any feedback you have on what we can do better.
> Thank you!

What can _we_ do to help you?

~~~
Hannah_OWID
Any really honest feedback on the usability of our website would be the best
thing for us.

We have lots of content - spanning everything from population growth to
plastic pollution, income inequality to cancer rates. This is of course a key
part of our work. But this could make it difficult for people to find what
they're looking for.

Do you manage to find it easy to navigate? Is there anything you would
recommend we do to make it easier for people to find content?

~~~
arikr
You might find some of the usability testing services useful also

There's a list of some here:

[http://www.usefulusability.com/usertesting-
alternatives/](http://www.usefulusability.com/usertesting-alternatives/)

and here

[https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/usertesting-2](https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/usertesting-2)

They give you videos with people's out loud thoughts about for example trying
to accomplish specific goals with your sites, which should be really useful.

And for a more guerrilla approach you might find this article useful:

[https://medium.com/@leemunroe/how-our-product-design-team-
co...](https://medium.com/@leemunroe/how-our-product-design-team-conducts-
usability-tests-every-2-weeks-afa8c60a8616)

~~~
Hannah_OWID
Great recommendations. Thanks for the tips. We've found it really useful
recently to sit next to someone in person and ask them to navigate. It reveals
a lot of unexpected outcomes just by watching them use the site.

But of course, in-person testing can be tricky to scale so an online service
is exactly what we're looking for. We'll check them out!

------
betocmn
Hey guys, great to see OurWorldInData here, huge fan! I've been following Max
and the project for years. One thing I would love to see is "Immigration" as a
category and consequently more data about the movement of people.

~~~
ourworldindata
Hi betocmn, I'm happy to hear that! Yes, took quite a few years to piece
everything together.

We have a long list of topics that we want to work on
[https://ourworldindata.org/about/list-of-all-data-
entries](https://ourworldindata.org/about/list-of-all-data-entries) (And
further work on the existing ones.)

It's not just you, a research project on migration is on the very top of what
our readers ask us. Currently we try to make the structure of the site clear
and the interactive charts intuitive. But once we get back to research your
topic will be one of the first ones we work on. (We are just 4 researchers
doing this so it might take some months still though)

------
sbr464
Thanks for sharing your findings & datasets, I’ll definitely be following your
work. I saw your datasets repo on github, I was curious if any of the raw data
or messier bulk data was available?

They seemed to be summarized, or the result of a larger project, vs the
structural content.

I did see mentions of using public/gov datasets, but was curious if you had
any larger work accumulated?

Definitely not complaining, more curious from a research perspective. Thanks
again.

------
TimJRobinson
Your site reminded me one of my favorite charts and tweets of all time, so I
want back to look and it was from max at ourworldindata way back in 2017! It's
this one:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/8528130327238574...](https://mobile.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/852813032723857409)

Thanks for doing this, I love having big easily accessible data to show people
how then world really is.

------
1ste
Wow, this is awesome. I have a project where I want to visualise reported news
and weather on the world including trends of news topics. It will be at
world.ie (nothing there yet)

~~~
ourworldindata
There should be many more projects like ours so I'm happy to hear that! I'd
really like it if we had as much reporting on the slow long-term changes as we
have media that focusses on single events in the last 24 hours.

------
vharuck
This is great! Nice job balancing data with explanations. Health data is often
oversimplified or not understandable by lay people.

For the cancer section, I'm pretty sure you're showing net survival rates. You
should mention this to avoid people from thinking they're actual survival
rates.

In the last two charts on the cancer page, what does the circle size show?
Total GDP? Patient count?

~~~
nettamar
It shows the population of the country. I agree it should be labelled.

~~~
Hannah_OWID
Thank you both for flagging this. I agree it's not clear at the moment. We are
doing some tweaks on the interactive charts and will make sure to include this
labelling.

------
alphakilo
This look really interesting. I am really happy to see something with great
benefit to society in YC. I would suggest looking at Future Agenda [1]. I have
worked with them in the university setting and both OWID and FA seem to be in
line.

[1] [https://www.futureagenda.org/](https://www.futureagenda.org/)

------
lifeisstillgood
This is absolutely fantastic ! I have been banging on about wanting a "ordered
backlog" of global issues that could be used to anchor our politics in the
daily twitter storms of our attention battles. This looks like it could become
my go to site

Good luck guys, we are rooting for you

~~~
ourworldindata
Thank you very much!! Let us know if you are missing something to make it your
go to site.

------
z3t4
It would be cool to have the data in a virtual cacheable JS database that can
run SQL queries. Eg something that you could just include in a script tag. And
also run locally. To allow anyone to easily create and share cool interactive
graphs.

------
contingencies
Anecdata. Applied for a UN World Food Program grant this morning and they
asked us to re-waffle the humans-vs-earth problem. A URL to your data would
have been a neat answer :)

------
tschellenbach
this is great, bookmarked it. a news feed of research about the topics i care
about it would be awesome. so nice to see progress instead of depressing news
articles.

~~~
ourworldindata
We were thinking of building "a news feed of research about the topics [you]
care about".

What do you have in mind? Do you have an example?

We'd be curious what it is that you would expect there. Thanks!

------
thedudeabides5
How about an API?

~~~
sbr464
I'm curious about an API also.

------
countryqt30
One of the most important metrics is entirely missing: wealth and income,
finances are totally missing

------
jpvelez
I think the work you do is vastly important, and it is especially heartening
that it originated in academia. In the age of choose-your-own-facts, academics
of all stripes have a moral duty to engage the public on what is - and,
crucially, what isn’t - known about nature and society. And they’re largely
asleep at the switch. So this is major progress.

A couple of long-term ideas:

\- breadth of topic: global development trends are a natural and important
place to start. However, this is pretty remote, non-experiential stuff for
most people. What about a canonical, accessible repository of what is known
about nutrition and health, for instance? (“Is bacon really bad for me?” ...
with links to every study ever, statistical meta-studies on top of these
“research atoms”, and a Vox-esque explainer/lit review layered on top, giving
laypeople the tldr). This example is well outside your (well-chosen) scope,
probably, but IMO the generic problem here is access to intelligible
(scientific) knowledge about anything that affects people and their
understanding of the world around them.

\- moving the data to the “point of sale”: a huge fraction of the people
asking “is the world getting more violent” won’t ever find your website,
because people don’t think in terms of “global development trends data
websites”, but they just ask questions, and expect Google to answer them. It
seems like the long term play is to make expert knowledge itself computational
and linked, and for domain-specific knowledge aggregators and synthesizers
such as yourselves to work with the Googles of the world so that when I ask
“hey Siri, is the world getting more violent?” I get a crisp “no. There are
fewer wars and crime trends are declining in most countries, tap to find out
more,” with the tap taking me to a source I can trust (because it references
said underlying knowledge base) instead of some random shallow news article.
I’m in in no way knocking your current product strategy of putting up a high
quality space on the web you can curate and control - it’s practical,
valuable, and honorable - but I think the future ultimately lies in making
expert knowledge structured, and linking it directly to answers to low-intent,
everyday questions that everybody has, instead of hoping people know about the
domain / are motivated enough to find and dig through your website.

~~~
Hannah_OWID
Yes, you're absolutely right! And actually, much more recently we have been
been trying to steer our work towards addressing point (2) you raise above.

It became apparent to us, as you say, that most people will find this stuff
simply by asking google specific questions e.g. "how many people are there in
the world?". And a lot of our existing content will not appear in Google or
Siri as the answer, despite us having it in longer articles on the site.

So we've been very recently trying to answer much more explicit questions that
people would ask (although we should have been doing this much earlier), and
are thinking of reformatting a lot of our existing content in this way too.

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts - it's really helpful perspective for
us.

------
anigbrowl
Fake news.

I applaud what you're trying to do, and look forward to using it, but the
problem is that the most studiously honest broker can be slandered as either
the plaything or the cynical agent of vested interests at virtually no cost.
The arguments of bad faith actors are not based on substantive disagreement
but on inducement of emotional posture.

One strategic response to this might be to formalize your citation process.
You cite various media organs that use OWID as a source; could you establish
partnerships or public agreements such that if a media outlet uses your
material as a source, they do not cherry-pick but must present it in an embed
to the reader, and can be called out, cut off, or be subject to contractual
penalties if they knowingly misrepresent the source data?

[https://ourworldindata.org/about/coverage#coverage](https://ourworldindata.org/about/coverage#coverage)

Edit to add that this isn't a problem I think you can or should have to
unilaterally solve, but rather than observation that our lack of any good
mechanism for certifying sufficient consensus is an unfortunate obstacle to
OWID's very worthy mission.

------
Khanhanhan
I stumbled upon your website a couple of days ago and found its content
extremely useful. The language is precise, opinions balanced and use of data
is sensible. It feels like you have no agenda other than bringing some
objectivity to the discussions. I hope your journey into the startup world
won't change it. Good luck!

~~~
ourworldindata
Our main goal is what you say. I am happy to hear that. Thank you! It is
exactly what we try to do.

