Me

fubits

I’m Ilja [ɪlʲˈja || Илья] – an Army Combat Veteran, turned Accidental Social Scientist1 turned PR Assistant / SciComm Aficionado, turned Computational Social Scientist2, turned Developer & Designer, based in Berlin, Germany.

Since 2016 I've been freelancing as a developer, “data person”3, product | web designer 🦄, and consultant for not-for-profit organizations. From 2018 to 2021 I worked as Ranking Digital Rights' (New America) Data Engineer / Tech Lead, and conceptualised and developed their end-to-end data management system for the annual RDR Corporate Accountability Index.

Freelancing

I’m always keen to explore ways to help not-for-profit organizations advance their mission. I create websites, maps, data- & information visualizations, and/or stand-alone web apps with a low-dependency & low-maintenance stack (JAMstack). Check out my Portofolio page for a visual impression.

My Portfolio

Talks

See the Talks page for slides, and workshop materials.

Contact

You’ll find me on:

GPDR, Data Protection, Privacy

This is a static site written with R Markdown and compiled/rendered locally (with Hugo & by Blogdown) on my laptop — without a CMS, any data bases, cookies, trackers, or whatever. I don’t run a mailing list, don’t collect any data and there’s nothing to opt in here https://dadascience.design/*. When in doubt, consult this or XKCD.


  1. Communication Science and Political Science, B.A. thesis on “Fifty Shades of Data”. ↩︎

  2. My Master’s degree is literally just Political Science as a major and (Applied) Computer Science as a “minor”, rooted in my own little epistemology of data-driven “(arti)facts”. I wrote my Master thesis on Usability in Social Research, where I conducted a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of a human-centered design approach for infrastructure development in non-profit contexts. ↩︎

  3. Randy Au has written a very smart piece on being the first person to bring data science to a small organisations: “small companies don’t need a data scientist, but they need a “data person” (Au 2019). ↩︎