Forest Gregg
Forest Gregg was a partner at DataMade from 2013 - 2025. He is still trying to find ways that information and information technology can help the people of Chicago recognize, understand, and address our shared challenges and opportunities. As a partner at DataMade, he works with clients, helps staff grow, and looks for ways for our company be better for our clients and for ourselves. He has been trained as a sociologist – particularly in quantitative methods and urban sociology. The statistics and machine learning training is useful on projects like dedupe and usaddress; the urban sociology training is useful for projects like Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks and Where to Buy. From a spell as professional juggler, Forest is pretty good at games of accurate, under-handed tossing.
Posts by Forest
A new era for DataMade and Forest
Over the past twelve years, it has been my great privilege to help DataMade grow to an established, successful company and an important actor in Chicago’s civil society. At the end of January 2025, I will be leaving this mighty and hearty company. As I leave for my next endeavor, a reflection on lessons learned at DataMade.
Working against systems of oppression
Last summer, DataMade made a commitment to examine the ways in which our work has supported systems that destroy Black lives, particularly policing and incarceration. As we wrote then, this is slow work, and much of it is quiet work rooted in reflection, study, and relationship building. A year later, we’d like to share an update on the steps we have taken so far and reaffirm our commitment to continue working to redirect power from oppressive systems to those that support democracy, justice, and equity for all.
Hannah Cushman Garland is now a Partner at DataMade
Today we’re happy to announce that Hannah Cushman Garland has joined Derek Eder and Forest Gregg as a Partner and co-owner of DataMade. Hannah joined the DataMade team as a Developer in 2016. An alumna of the Missouri School of Journalism and a veteran of the Associated Press, she remains deeply interested in people, systems, and power. She brings a healthy skepticism to technology, believing that it can alleviate specific pain points but is rarely a solution in and of itself.
Accounting for our part in supporting systems of oppression
In this time of grief and uprising, we have been examining the ways that we, as a company, have supported systems that destroy Black lives, and what we can do to meet this moment of possibility. It is slow work and much of it should be quiet work. Over the past ten years, we have come to know that policing in America is not compatible with a healthy, equitable democracy; that policing in America destroys precious Black lives like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rekia Boyd, Quintonio LeGrier, Bettie Jones, Harith Augustus, and Laquan McDonald.
DataMade’s response to COVID-19
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the DataMade team is now 100% remote and practicing social distancing. We plan on maintaining this setup for the duration of the outbreak and will keep our office operating at full capacity. Here are a few resources for transitioning to remote teams and resources and actions to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Apply for the inaugural DataMade Mentorship Program
The DataMade mentorship is a six-week, one-on-one mentorship program for beginning technologists and the technologically curious working to develop a specific skill or address a specific problem. We’re accepting applications for the first cohort through October 25, 2018!
Introducing the Chicago Data Collaborative
DataMade is thrilled to take part in the launch of the Chicago Data Collaborative, a cooperative effort by civil society organizations to share capacity with the goal of strengthening local criminal justice reporting and advocacy in Chicago and Cook County.
Modern Approaches to Schema Matching
In this memo, we review the literature on schema matching—a set of principled approaches to automatically detecting what kinds of data are contained in databases of enormous size and uncertain format.
Existing research tools make it difficult for teams to pursue investigations when source material is uncertain or contradictory. This whitepaper outlines the requirements for a knowledge system that can manage ambiguity during investigations and produce useful, structured data as a byproduct.
This whitepaper describes technical measures that can be used to protect data about immigrants in a municipal ID program.
One of the wonderful things about civic technology is that no one really knows what it means. ‘Civic technology’ covers varying types of projects made by a variety of people trying to do very different things. This fuzziness is useful. It challenges civic technologists to think independently about what exactly they are trying to do, while providing a wide set of projects and models to steal from or define themselves against. All the same, we can begin to identify four major intentions of civic apps.
Today, we are excited to announce a major update to the dedupe library! The new features include parallel processing support, improved record linkage across files, and a new asynchronous architecture.