A US charity that connects other charities with data scientists who want to volunteer, has launched a UK branch.

DataKind UK is the first international branch of US non-profit DataKind and was announced yesterday as part of Big Data Week. It has a team of five UK directors, is now actively looking for funding and plans to register with the Charity Commission.

Last autumn DataKind hosted one of its ‘data dive’ weekends in London, where 70 data scientists spent two days working with Oxfam, Place2Be and Keyfund tackling some of their issues with data.

Duncan Ross, director of data science at Teradata, who is one of the directors at DataKind UK, told civilsociety.co.uk that one of main reasons for setting up the UK chapter was that they had already worked with Place2Be but it was “difficult with the main organisation being on the other side of the Atlantic”.

Ross aims to run the next UK data dive in July and said: “We are actively looking for charities who want to take part.”

As well as organising ‘data dives’ DataKind UK will organise meetings to share ideas on the use of data, and pair up scientists with charities to work on longer-term projects.

Charities and data scientists can register their interest on the organisation’s website.