When Open Data gets Personal

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Patrick and motorcycles. We had good time riding bikes together.
Him on his trusty old Honda and me on my trusty old BMW.

New Memorial Fund Site Setup
Giveforward has been designated as the foudation site for The Partick Arbogast Memorial Scholarship Fund.

So an update on a special and personal type of #opendata website dedicated to the Patrick Arbogast Scholarship Fund:

I posted this originally to my Facebook account which is strictly for my non-professional contacts. I am not sure how many of my friends are on Google+ and not on Facebook so excuse the cross-post.


About Patrick Arbogast 
He was not in the media and he was not facing legal problems. He was facing his own internal issues that he was not quick to talk about. Patrick Arbogast was my friend for over 30 years and a rising star in the biostatistics world with an emphasis on holistic medicine. He left his academic job (research professor) at Vanderbilt to take a job as a senior researcher at Kaiser Permanente before taking his own life in August. No one knows why he committed suicide but he did have a history of depression and we all miss him.


The Patrick Arbogast Memorial Scholarship
In September I pledged to setup a fund at our alma mater, Washington State University. This fund would be a $1000.00 scholarship awarded to anyone from Pasco High School majoring in Mathematics at WSU. Patrick was very fond of both his high school and his undergraduate university and is very much missed by the mathematicians he mentored as a TA.

In speaking with the WSU endowment people, I learned that I will need to raise $25,000.00 to support the $1000.00 per year scholarship.

Every financial transaction and disbursement will be made as a data set and available for analysis on the website. I registered the domain this morning and spent 259.00 for a 5 year license and I will be hosting the site on a Rackspace Cloud Virtual Server.

I am going to be setting up the website for the Patrick Arbogast scholarship fund this Spring. The site will accept donations online and we will be using a data visualization tool to show exactly where the funds went (to Washington State University). I will work with the foundation people to link the donation transaction to a WSU bank account and will get a financial statement every month from the endowment.


The Open Data
The financial reporting data from the fund at WSU will be posted on the website. The website will also show any disbursements to scholars.

I appreciate your patience. The new job and new family arrangements while life changing for the better have been time consuming- in a good way!

Now I have some extra time to focus on my friend. I will post updates here as the site gets put together.

Thank you to everyone that said goodbye to him and now something positive can come out of this.

Kind regards

Jason Hare

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