"Near Data" and "Far Data" for Urban Sustainability: How Do Community Advocates Envision Data Intermediaries?

In the densifying data ecosystem of today’s cities, data intermediaries are crucial stakeholders in facilitating data access and use. Community advocates live in these sites of social injustices and opportunities for change. Highly experienced in working with data to enact change, they offer distinctive insights on data practices and tools. This paper examines the unique perspectives that community advocates offer on data intermediaries. Based on interviews with 17 advocates working with 23 grassroots and nonprofit organizations, we propose the quality of "near" and "far" to be seriously considered in data intermediaries' works and articulate advocates’ vision of connecting ``near data’’ and ``far data.” To pursue this vision, we identified three pathways for data intermediaries: align data exploration with ways of storytelling, communicate context and uncertainties, and decenter artifacts for relationship building. These pathways help data intermediaries to put data feminism into practice, surface design opportunities and tensions, and raise key questions for supporting the pursuit of the Right to the City.