What’s the best way to learn how to run a data expedition? To be a part of one! That’s why our workshop “Learn how to run your own Data Expedition” at this week’s Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva will take its participants on a data expedition of their own. These new data explorers will be guided on a journey through our crowdsourced database of Bangladesh garment factory data.

A data expedition is a fun and hands-on romp through data. It brings together people of different backgrounds to pool their abilities and help each other learn how to ask questions with data and communicate the answers they find. In a three-hour workshop taking place on Thursday, September 19 at OKCon 2013, we’ll be introducing the data expedition format and teaching participants how to organize data expeditions for their own local communities.

This introduction to data expeditions will be a data expedition in its own right. In a previous expedition, data explorers responded to the Rana Plaza garment factory catastrophe by finding data on Bangladesh garment factories and using it to shed new light on the business practices of global garment brands. The crowdsourced garment factory database they created will serve as the starting-point on Thursday. Expedition participants will peruse the database for insight into the garment supply chain and will learn how to communicate their findings through visualizations and geomaps.

We’ll be posting more about participants’ creations in the days after the workshop—stay tuned for new discoveries from our intrepid data explorers!