The first trainings took place on September 9 and 11. Before the events, we sent out a questionnaire to get an idea of what skills participants already have and what they are interested in learning. It turned out from the responses that tools for data analysis and visualization would be the most useful for their daily work, so we decided to cover formatting tricks, functions, pivot tables and visualization with charts. To make the work more effective, we separated a beginner and an advanced group, and customized the material to the different skill levels, covering basic formatting and functions in the former and advanced formatting, pivot tables and charts in the latter group. We have worked with real world data on school performance and on migration, published by the Office of Education and the Hungarian Central Statistics Office.

A slight piquancy is added to the events by the fact that we were holding the workshops during the hours when the Hungarian police saw fit to raid the offices of NGOs distributing Norway Grants.

On the theme of open data, there was a very interesting discussion on how the open data movement can help in strengthening digital democracy in Indonesia. One of the examples shown is the story of KawalPemilu , a platform for voter count verification which uses crowdsourcing; it was created by just five poeple, and yet played a pivotal role in Indonesia’s 2014 presidential election as a checking mechanism for the voter count. The platform allows citizens of Indonesia to see and verify the voter count of the election and to check if anything is amiss. It stood as a strong example of citizen participation in the Indonesian elections.

Regarding the state of open data more generally in Indonesia, there was an overall acknowledgement that the movement is still in early stages. There is still a lot of need to raise awareness regarding the importance and usage of it, as well as skills around how to actually work with the data. Also notable in the discussion is the importance of collaboration between the various open data actors from both the supply and demand side such as government, CSO, and citizens.

Meetups like these provide a great platform for these actors in the open data space to actually connect and collaborate with each other – having these more frequently would strengthen the movement as a whole.

The purpose of this event is twofold. The first is to introduce the Code for Bandung movement to the people of Bandung and the second is to give an insight how the people of Bandung can use data especially open data for civic technology. The second purpose is very important because right now awareness regarding the usage of data for civic tech is still low, even in the technology community. There are currently many effort in the field of data based decision for business but for things like civic tech based on data is still pretty much undeveloped.

In the event, we talked about things such as: what is data and open data; why those are important; examples of civic tech apps using data that is publicly available; etc. One example of such project was the water height in the city water canal which gives early warning information for flood alert. Besides civic tech usage, we also discussed about making a start-up with publicly available data, and continued with listing and searching what kind of data actually can be provided by the government of Bandung and can be used to create a useful solution.

The event covered some interesting topics. It is a nice and refreshing perspective to see how data can used for social and civic goals from the perspective of the technology people. It brings to mind that sometimes the most creative uses of data can be achieved by combining the perspective of many different people from different backgrounds, such as from the government, technology, and advocacy.

The concept of the Pizza Data community is simple : Talking about data while enjoying a slice of pizza. The first meetup was held in a co-working space in Bandung Co n Co and supported by many communities in Bandung such as Hackerspace Bandung and FOWAB . It was a fun meetup ! Eventbrite tickets were sold out, the room was fully booked and there were many people from a diverse background such as academia, business, government and social movements like Code For Bandung .

It is interesting when people from mixed backgrounds like that gather around in a room and then talk about their experiences working with data. We heard stories about the how the government collects and uses data in Indonesia, stories about how businesses uses their data and how they play with data to take business decisions based on it, and of course about the usage of data in civic tech apps. Everyone was eager to learn and share their skills, making this a very good mix of people.

Overall, it is a great first meetup that serves as a good way for the Pizza Data community going forward. Hopefully the community will grow and spread to other Indonesian cities so the knowledge and awareness about data will spread to as many people as possible in Indonesia.

Meetup of Open Data Club of CSOs in Jakarta

The Open Data Club membership was open for all CSO interested in working with data. Right now the meetings are concentrated in Jakarta but as the community gaining more momentum it will try to do the meetup in other cities as well. Need to be noted that this is might the first data-related community of CSOs, so this is a great start for data awareness for CSO in Indonesia. Right now there are more than 10 organizations took part in the meetups, including some goverments and funders.

The first meetup, initiated by Perludem, had quite a mixed group, ranging from CSOs, goverment, and other data focused movements. However the focus is still on how to use data for advocacy, a theme that CSOs are very interested in. There was a lot of talking about how CSOs can get data, manage and analyse it and finally use it to for storytelling and evidence based campaigning in the form of infographics or interactive apps. One important point that also has been raised is how CSOs can collaborate and potentially combine their data and push more for knowledge sharing and collective advocacy.

The Open Data Club became a weekly meetup in which the participating CSOs take turns in hosting the event. This means that they all visit the offices of all participants CSOs and get to know each other a little better. One more interesting thing is that the CSOs are starting to bond and create action plans (called bubbles) of things they want to achieve through the meetups. By doing this, hopefully after several meetups there will something concrete that the Open Data Club can create and build together.

The Open Data Club marks something quite important for CSO in Indonesia. It shows that interest and awareness on working with data is gaining ground in Indonesia and the CSOs are starting to collaborate and work together for the greater good. Let’s hope this great community can create great things in the future!

Usually when I have any scraping to do I ask Thej  if he can do it and then take a nap. However, Thej is on vacation so I was stuck either waiting for him to come back or I could try to do it myself. It was basic text, not much html, no images, and a few pages, so I went for it with some non coder tools.

I checked the School of Data scraping section for some tools and they have a nice little section on using browser based scraping tools. I did a chrome store search and came across WebScraper.

I glanced through the video sort of paying attention got the gist of it and started to play with the tool.  It took awhile for me to figure out.  I highly recommend very carefully going through the tutorials.  The videos take you through the process but are not very clear for complete newbies like me so it took a few views to understand the hierarchy concept and how to adapt their example to the site I was scraping.

I got the hang of doing one page and then figuring out how to tell it to go to another page, again I had to spend quite a bit of time rewatching the tutorial. At the end of the day I got the data in neat columns in CSV without too much trouble.  I would recommend WebScraper for people who want to do some basic scraping.

It is as visual as you can get though the terminology is still very technical.   You have to do into the developer tools folder which can feel intimidating but ultimately satisfying in the end.

Though I’ll probably still call Thej.

Why maps are useful visualization tools? What doesn’t work with maps? Today we hosted a School of Data skillshare with Codrina Ilie, School of data Fellow.

Codrina Ilie shares perspectives on building a map project

What makes a good map? How can perspective, assumptions and even colour change the quality of the map? This is a one-hour video skillshare to learn all about map making from our School of Data fellow:

Learn some basic mapping skills with slides

Resources:

• BBC series – Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession –
• The ColourBrewer is a tool to design maps

http://www.davidrumsey.com/

• OSGeo Live
• Book: How Maps Lie

(Note: the hand drawn map was created at School of Data Summer Camp. Photo by Heather Leson CCBY)

This time around, the #OpenData party moved from the Nigeria Capital – Abuja to Gusau, Zamfara and was held at the Zamfara Zakat and Endowment Board Hall between September Thursday, 25 and Friday, 26, 2014. With 40 participant all set for this budget data expedition, participants included the state Budget Monitoring Group (A coalition of NGOs in Zamfara) coordinated by the DFID (Development for International Development) State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI),other international NGOs such as Society for Family Health (SFH), Save the Children, amongst others.

Group picture of participants at the #OpenData Party in Zamfara

But how do you teach data and its use in a less-technology savvy region? We had to de-mystify teaching data to this community, by engaging in traditional visualization and scraping – which means the use of paper artworks in visualizing the data we already made available on the Education Budget Tracker. “I never believed we could visualize the education budget data of the federal government as easy as what was on the wall” exclaimed Ahmed Ibrahim of SAVI

Visualization of the Education Budget for Federal Schools in Zamfara

As budgets have become a holy grail especially with state government in Nigeria, of most importance to the participants on the first day, was how to find budget data, and processes involved in tracking if services were really delivered, as promised in the budget. Finding the budget data of the state has been a little bit hectic, but with much advocacy, the government has been able to release dataset on the education and health sector. So what have been the challenges of the NGOs in tracking or using this data, as they have been engaged in budget tracking for a while now?

Challenges of Budget Tracking Highlighted by participants

“Well, it is important to note that getting the government to release the data took us some time and rigorous advocacy, added to the fact that we ourselves needed training on analysis, and telling stories out of the budget data” explained Joels Terks Abaver of the Christian Association of Non Indigenes. During one of the break out session, access to budget information and training on how to use this budget data became a prominent challenge in the resolution of the several groups.

The second day took participants through the data pipelines, while running an expedition on the available education and health sector budget data that was presented on the first day. Alas! We found out a big challenge on this budget data – it was not location specific! How does one track a budget data that does not answer the question of where? When involved in budget tracking, it is important to have a description data that states where exactly the funds will go. An example is Construction of Borehole water pump in Kaura Namoda LGA Primary School, or we include the budget of Kaura Namoda LGA Primary School as a subtitle in the budget document.

Taking participants through the data pipelines and how it relates to the Monitoring and Evaluation System

In communities like this, it is important to note that soft skills are needed to be taught – , like having 80% of the participants not knowing why excel spreadsheets are been used for budget data; like 70% of participants not knowing there is a Google spreadsheet that works like Microsoft Excel; like all participants not even knowing where to get the Nigeria Budget data and not knowing what Open Data means. Well moving through the school of data through the Open Data Party in this part of the world, as changed that notion.”It was an interesting and educative 2-day event taking us through the budget cycle and how budget data relates to tracking” Babangida Ummar, the Chairman of the Budget Working Group said.

Going forward, this group of NGO and journalist has decided to join trusted sources that will be monitoring service delivery of four education institutions in the state, using the Education Budget Tracker. It was an exciting 2-day as we now hope to have a monthly engagement with this working group, as a renewed effort in ensuring service delivery in the education sector. Wondering where the next data party will happen? We are going to the South – South of Nigeria in the month of October – Calabar to be precise, and on the last day of the month, we will be rocking Abuja!

I arrived in the vibrant Maboneng district in central Johannesburg excited (and a little nervous) about helping my fellow school of Data Fellow Siyabonga facilitate our first local workshop with media organisations The Con and Media Monitoring Africa. Although I’ve attended a data workshop this was my first experience of being on the other end and it was an incredible learning experience. Siya did a fantastic job of leading the organisations in defining and conceptualising their data projects that they’ll be working on over the course of the rest of the year and I certainly borrowed and learned a lot from his workshop format.

It was great to watch more experienced facilitators, Jason from Code for South Africa and Michael from The School of Data, work their magic and share their expert knowledge on more advanced tools and techniques for working with and presenting data and see the attendees eyes light up at the possibilities and potential applications of their data.

Johannesburg sunset at the workshop venue

A few days later we found ourselves back in the thick of things giving the second workshop in Cape Town for civil society organisations Black Sash and Ndifuna Ukwazi. I adapted Siyabonga’s workshop format slightly, shifting the emphasis from journalism to advocacy and effecting social change for our civil society attendees.

We started off examining the broader goals of the organisation and worked backwards to identify where and how data can help them achieve their goals, as data for data’s sake in isolation is meaningless and our aim is to help them produce meaningful data projects that make a tangible contribution to their goals.

The team from Ndifuna Ukwazi at work

We then covered some general data principles and skills like the data pipeline and working with spreadsheets and easy-to-use tools like Datawrapper and Infogr.am, as well as some more advanced (and much needed) data cleaning using Open Refine as well as scraping data using Tabula which the teams found extremely useful, having been manually typing out information from pdfs up until this point.

Both organisations arrived with the data they wanted to work with at hand and it immediately became apparent that it needed a lot of cleaning. The understanding the organisations gained around working with data allowed them to reexamine the way they collect and source data, particularly for Black Sash who realised they need to redesign their surveys they use. This will be an interesting challenge over the next few months as the survey re-design will still need to remain compatible with the old survey formats to be useful for comparison and analysis and I hope to be able to draw on the experience and expertise of the School of Data network to come up with a viable solution.

Siya working his magic with the Black Sash team

By the end of the workshop both organisations had produced some visualisations using their data and had a clear project plan of how they want to move forward, which I think is a great achievement! I was blown away by the enthusiasm and work ethic of the attendees and I’m looking forward to working with them over the next few months and helping them produce effective data projects that will contribute to more inclusive, equitable local governance.

In this 40 minute video, Hannah shares some tips and best practices:

Design by slides

The world is a design museum – what existing designs achieve similar things? How specifically do they do this? How can this inform your digital storytelling?

Resources:

Want to learn more? Here are some great resources from Hannah and the network:

• Open Font Library
• Google Fonts
• Photo Pin (Creative Commons Images)
• Image Optimizer
• NattyWare (image fixing)
• Screenpresso

Hannah shared some of her other design work. It is great to see how data & design can be used in urban spaces: Project Busart.

We are planning more School of Data Skillshares. In the coming weeks, there will be sessions about impact & evaluation as well as best practices for mapping.