---
name: meta-social-connectedness-index-ingestion
description: "How to get Meta Social Connectedness Index data into a pandas DataFrame and Parquet: access, the request, the format, limits, quirks and terms."
---

# Load Meta country connectedness into pandas and Parquet

Source entry: https://signal-lab-jet.vercel.app/datasets/meta-social-connectedness-index
Provider: https://data.humdata.org/dataset/social-connectedness-index
Checked against the provider's documentation: 2026-11-01

## Access
- No account or key for the checked country CSV download.
- The HDX metadata API lists ten resources and their current download URLs.

## Request
```bash
curl -O 'https://data.humdata.org/dataset/e9988552-74e4-4ff4-943f-c782ac8bca87/resource/652cf9c9-541f-47de-8d53-ff818062bd0c/download/country.csv'
```

## Format
CSV country pairs with user_country, friend_country, user_region, friend_region and scaled_sci.

## Load into pandas and Parquet
Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.
```python
"""Meta Social Connectedness Index country pairs -> pandas -> Parquet. No key."""
import io
import requests
import pandas as pd

URL = "https://data.humdata.org/dataset/e9988552-74e4-4ff4-943f-c782ac8bca87/resource/652cf9c9-541f-47de-8d53-ff818062bd0c/download/country.csv"
r = requests.get(URL, timeout=60)
r.raise_for_status()
df = pd.read_csv(io.BytesIO(r.content))
df.to_parquet("meta_sci_country.parquet", index=False)
codes = set(df["user_country"]) | set(df["friend_country"])
print(len(df), "country pairs", len(codes), "country codes", "columns", ", ".join(df.columns))
```
Run by us on 2026-11-01 (python 3.13.5 | pandas 3.1.0 | pyarrow 26.0.0 | requests 2.34.2). Result: 31684 country pairs 178 country codes columns user_country, friend_country, user_region, friend_region, scaled_sci

## Limits
- Rate limit: Not stated.
- The country file is about 0.56 MB; some subnational files are hundreds of megabytes.
- Older versions are not provided.

## Quirks
- scaled_sci is a relative index, not a raw friendship or user count.
- Do not combine releases as a time series because construction methods can change without historical backfills.
- Country and region pairs are directional columns even when an analysis later treats the relationship as symmetric.

## Terms and attribution
- The checked HDX metadata marks the data CC0 with no restrictions.
- The dataset page supplies academic citations for the index methodology.
- Terms page: https://data.humdata.org/api/action/package_show?id=social-connectedness-index

## Sources
- https://data.humdata.org/api/action/package_show?id=social-connectedness-index: "The Social Connectedness Index (SCI) quantifies the relative probability that two individuals from different geographies are Facebook friends"
- https://data.humdata.org/api/action/package_show?id=social-connectedness-index: "including new subnational units across 178 countries"
- https://data.humdata.org/api/action/package_show?id=social-connectedness-index: "Public Domain / No restrictions (CC0)"
- https://data.humdata.org/api/action/package_show?id=social-connectedness-index: "We do not provide older versions of the Social Connectedness Index"

## Help improve this skill
Missing a source, or see something to improve? Call the MCP tool suggest_source or feedback (or POST /api/suggest or /api/feedback). Reviewed ideas: https://signal-lab-jet.vercel.app/agent-suggestions

Information for educational purposes only. Free tiers, limits and licenses belong to the providers and may change; check the provider's own terms before using the data.