Digital Nomad Index

Inspiration

As college students preparing to enter a more remote and flexible workforce, we’re rethinking what it means to balance work, life, and travel. In today’s digital era, we’re no longer limited to traditional office jobs or staying in one place. Instead, we’re looking for opportunities to explore the world without sacrificing our careers or draining our savings.

What it does

The project uses data visualization to compare different countries/cities based on quality of life values along with other indexes in order to determine which country/city is best for a digital nomad.

How we built it

This project was built with Python on jupyter notebooks. We then primarily used data manipulation and visualization libraries such as pandas, numpy, and matplotlib.

Challenges we ran into

Once we had an idea of what we wanted our project to be, we ran into issues of finding a dataset that wasn't behind a paywall. Additionally, half of our team was inexperienced with data analysis so initial development was slow. Another challenge was that we found that different datasets often have their own bias and formulation. Especially with the data we were working with since it was based off of other values and combined into an equation or it didn't have documentation on how it was obtained. We found this bias through testing for feature importance using linear regression and random forest.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although there was definitely a steep learning curve for all of us, we are proud of being able to manage the data in order to create potentially meaningful (but niche) visualizations.

What we learned

One notable thing we learned was that real-world data is often pretty skewed and non-linear which was what we are used to in our basic stats classes. But overall the journey to learn how to analyze, visualize, and transform data in order to work towards a goal was rewarding.

What's next for Digital Nomad Index

-Include Wi-Fi quality to ensure reliable remote work -Measure availability and affordability of coworking spaces -Factor in safety, visa accessibility, and community of remote workers -Add user-generated reviews or real-time feedback for more personalized recommendations