Individual Deliverable - Phase 1

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For the Phase 1 deliverable, I made contributions that helped our team solidify our concept and methodology. Our team worked together to determine the scope and details ofgit our project, specifically finding relevant data sources and deciding upon personas and models. I came up with the idea for one of our models to be used by one of our personas, which was a clustering model that would utilize similarity scores in order for a government worker to gain insight from a similar country’s recent policies. I also contributed to the team blog post by finalizing our ideas in a more formal writeup and pushing it to our site.

Something that I’ve enjoyed about Belgium is the waffles! I’ve also learned a lot about the structure and lawmaking processes of the EU, which I had no prior knowledge of. I’m really excited to contintue to learn about the way that data influences government and politics, especially considering the constraints of ethics and bias in data collection. My favorite excursion so far has been the EU Parliament because I learned a lot about the details of their meeting structure. It was cool to hear from someone who had worked as a translator for the Parliament members since he had a lot of experience to share and was more transparent than previous speakers had been.