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Liz Eddy is director of communications and events and Bob Filbin is chief data scientist at Crisis Text Line, a text messaging support service for people in crisis originally developed with Knight Foundation support. Knight is awarding Crisis Text Line, a previous winner of the Knight News Challenge, an additional $1.4 million in support as part of a $7 million funding round.Imagine you are a principal at a school: Do you know what is the worst time of day for bullying? Do you know what is the worst day of the week for eating disorders?Crisis Text Line has this data. And more.Liz EddyBob FilbinThink about the massive juicy data set Crisis Text Line has collected. More than 9 million messages have been exchanged on this free 24/7 text line for people in crisis in just over two years. The volume, velocity and variety of these messages make this data set a very interesting corpus. Better yet? It’s real time.The National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might have more data, but it takes years to collect, store and analyze. The Crisis Text Line data set is auto-tagged in real time and made available within seconds. So, that principal is looking at trends right now, with current students, teachers, vendors, social media, etc. Finally, school data can match the pace of school challenges.Same for police departments. Or, policymakers. Or, academics and researchers.Simply, Crisis Text Line is committed to leveraging its data to inform people and communities. For too long, this information has been slow, expensive and hard to consume. We believe a strong democracy depends on open data.