Victoria Ying is a second-year Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is dedicated to using machine learning and other technologies to advance equality and human welfare. She served as the product owner for Sprint #1 of this project, setting the vision for MVP1, prioritizing user stories, managing the product backlog, overseeing development stages, and evaluating product progress. She developed the website framework and worked on using search bar to fetch data from the Oxford Country Dataset. She is also responsible for providing technical support and facilitating collaborations among developers.
Nikhil George is an MPA1 at the Harvard Kennedy School and a dual degree with MIT Sloans MBA program. He is passionate about building products that use machine learning/ artificial intelligence to solve the world's most intractable problems. Nikhil served as the Scrum Master for this project, ensuring the team was following agile best practices during Sprint #1 such as ensuring user stories follow the INVEST framework, estimating story points and burn rate, faciliating daily standups, conducting sprint retrospective, and backlog grooming. He is also responsible for the creating the map visualization in Datawrapper after wrangling the Oxford country dataset in Python and for creating the pop-up feature for "restriction levels" in Javascript.
Nicholas Sung is an MPP2 at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is focused on increasing racial and gender diversity within the US diplomatic corps, and conflict prevention in the Indo-Pacific. Nicholas served as Web Developer for this project and was responsible for creating user stories, editing the 'About Us' page, and CSS formatting the main page 'Navigating the Pandemic'. Nicholas was also a Co-Scrum Master in Sprint 2, through which he ensured everyone followed the practices prescribed by Scrum. He removed several impediments and maintained the teams focus on the work in hand. He also enabled close cooperation across roles and addressed resource issues.
Pat Mitchell is an MPP1 at the Harvard Kennedy School. He enjoys using data to help federal, state, and local government agencies meet their mission goals and produce better outcomes for the people they serve. Pat took on the Product Owner role during Sprint 2, where he worked to define the goals and help the team prioritize new user stories after the launch of the first iteration. Pat also played a "jack of all trades" role in web development, working in four languages (Python, HTML, CSS, and Javascript) on various enhancements, from transforming source data to a usable format, to creating a more user-centric homepage.
Yousif Folathi is an MC-MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a finance and accounting graduate with 10 years of experience in the governmental sector. He is interested in building bridges between technical and non-technical professionals to help in the progression of UAE’s digital government transformation and reap the best value for money. During Sprint 2 Yousif was a Co-Scrum Master, in which he facilitated the meetings, noted the blockers, and kept track of the burndown rate. As a Web Developer, Yousif worked on data conversion using Javascript and CSV. Also, worked with Html and css in developing the aesthetics of the “About Us” page.