June 19th marks an important date in the history of SocialCops – our anniversary. On June 19th, 2013, Varun and I arrived in Delhi to kickstart a few pilots aimed at driving better decisions in governance through better data collection. Through the course of the next year, we piloted one of India’s first citizen ratings platform and leveraged data to drive decisions in sanitation and public infrastructure. We spent a good part of 2013 on pilots and building the SocialCops model.

A year later on June 19th, 2014, we held our first ever investor meeting where we welcomed an amazing set of investors on board after our first ever funding round. For the next year, we quietly piloted our tools with over 120 partners around India. We took feedback from them while silently paving our way to becoming the largest data exchange in the developing world. 2014 was about setting the base 🙂

2015 for us has been a year of growth. Here are a few highlights:

WE COLLECTED 10 MILLION DATA POINTS

We collected 10 million data points from our grassroot partners using our Collect tool, with people acting as human sensors from the remotest parts of the world.

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WE INDEXED 3000+ DATA SETS & 250 MILLION DATA POINTS

Our Search platform has now been enriched with data sets that allow us to pinpoint population demographics (age, genders and locations), employment rates, proximity to amenities (doctors, chemists, hospitals, markets, sabzi mandis), income, education levels and disease incidence.

For Excel lovers, our Excel plugin will help you find data right in Excel 🙂

MAKING DATA TELL STORIES

2015 saw us building visualizations and dashboards that can drive massive decisions around the world. We pioneered the first ever household-level village visualization dashboard and visualized data about 1.4 million schools through this dashboard.

We’ve always striven to democratize data. In the next week, we will be launching a tool that allows anyone to create a  thematic map at the press of a button. Simply upload your data, choose a template and click publish. Embed the map on your website or download them into your reports!

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

We crossed boundaries for the first time in June 2015, with data streaming in from partners in Indonesia. Over the course of the next few months, you will start seeing our footprint in Indonesia, Vietnam and parts of South East Asia and Africa.

SocialCops was founded to drive massive decisions using data — and, as of today, building a robust platform capability that would allow us to generate, process and visualize billions of data points to help people arrive at decisions.

OUR DATA REPOSITORY

For SocialCops’ third anniversary, as we make this move from SocialCops.org to SocialCops.com, we’re also announcing the massive repository of data that we have mined, generated and organised to help organizations make better decisions. Our data repository now spans over 250 million data points — spanning a comprehensive household and locality profile of the developing world — using data collected from our 120+ partners and both online and offline sources.

In the next few months, we will be working towards leveraging our massive data repository to help generate employment (by helping a taxi company target which village youth to recruit as drivers), reduce the spread of diseases (by leveraging the past 5 years data of disease outbreak), ensure more people get access to the right medicines (by helping pharmaceutical companies optimise their medical supply chains) and ensure that banks open branches in and around villages that need them the most.

What started as a journey of 2 nimble-toed 22 year olds on 19th June, 2013, has turned into a team of 25 (including interns and fellows) in our brand new office in Saket as of 19th June, 2015!

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The story has just begun… Come join us as we rewrite the future of decision making!