Participants at the Hack4Good 2014 in Nigeria
Leading the team, was Dimgba Kalu (Software Architect with Integrated Business Network and founder TechNigeria), who kick started the 3 day event that was built around 12 coders with other 18 participants that worked on the Climate Change adaptation stream of this year #Hack4Good. So what data did we explore and what was hacked over the weekend in Nigeria? Three streams were worked :
- Creating a satellite imagery tagging/tasking system that can help the National Space Research Development Agency deploy micromappers to tag satellite imageries from the NigeriaSat1 and NigeriaSat2
- Creating an i-reporting system that allows citizen reporting during disasters to Nigeria Emergency Management Agency
- Creating an application that allows citizens know the next water point and its quality within their community and using the newly released dataset from the Nigeria Millennium Development Goal Information System on water points in the country.
Looking at the three systems that was proposed to be developed by the 12 coders, one thing stands out, that in Nigeria application developers still find it difficult to produce apps that can engage citizens – a particular reason being that Nigerians communicate easily through the radio, followed by SMS as it was confirmed while I did a survey during the data exploration session.
Coders Hackspace
Going forward, all participants agreed that incorporating the above medium (Radio and SMS) and making games out of these application could arouse the interest of users in Nigeria. “It doesn’t mean that Nigerian users are not interested in mobile apps, what we as developers need is to make our apps more interesting” confirmed Jeremiah Ageni, a participant.
The three days event started with the cleaning of the water points data, while going through the data pipelines, allowing the participants to understand how these pipelines relates to mapping and hacking. While the 12 hackers were drawn into groups, the second day saw thorough hacking – into datasets and maps! Some hours into the second day, it became clear that the first task wouldn’t be achievable; so much energy should be channelled towards the second and third task.
SchoolofData Fellow – Oludotun Babayemi taking on the Data Exploration session
Hacking could be fun at times, when some other side attractions and talks come up – Manchester United winning big (there was a coder, that was checking every minutes and announcing scores) , old laptops breaking (seems coders in Abuja have old ones), coffee and tea running out (seems we ran out of coffee, like it was a sprint), failing operating systems (interestingly, no coders in the house had a Mac operating system), fear of power outage (all thanks to the power authority – we had 70 hours of uninterrupted power supply) , and no encouragement from the opposite sex (there was only two ladies that strolled into the hack space).
Bring on the energy to the hackspace
As the weekend drew to a close, coders were finalizing and preparing to show their great works. A demo and prototype of streams 2 and 3 were produced. The first team (working on stream 2), that won the hackathon developed EMERGY, an application that allows citizens to send geo-referenced reports disasters such as floods, oil spills, deforestation to the National Emergency Management Agency of Nigeria, and also create a situation awareness on disaster tagged/prone communities, while the second team, working on stream 3, developed KNOW YOUR WATER POINT an application that gives a geo-referenced position of water points in the country. It allows communities; emergency managers and international aid organizations know the next community where there is a water source, the type, and the condition of the water source.
(The winning team of the Hack4Good Nigeria) From Left -Ben; Manga; SchoolofData Fellow -Oludotun Babayemi; Habib; Chief Executive, CODE – Hamzat
Living with coders all through the weekend, was mind blowing, and these results and outputs would not be scaled without its challenges. “Bringing our EMERGY application live as an application that cuts across several platforms such as java that allows it to work on feature phones can be time consuming and needs financial and ideology support” said Manga, leader of the first team. Perhaps, if you want to code, do endeavour to code for good!
We all think we know what we mean by “a company”, such as the energy giants Shell or BP, but what is a company exactly? As OpenOil’s Amit Naresh explained in our OGP Workshop on “Working With Company Data” last week, the corporate structure of many multinational companies is a complex network of interconnected countries domiciled or registered in a wide variety of countries across the world in order to benefit from tax breaks and intricate financial dealings.
Given the structure of corporate networks can be so complex, how can we start to unpick and explore the data associated with company networks?
The following presentation – available here: School of Data: Company Networks – describes some of the ways in which we can start to map corporate networks using open company data published by OpenCorporates using OpenRefine.
We can also use OpenRefine to harvest data from OpenCorporates relating to the directors associated with a particular company or list of companies: School of Data: Grabbing Director Dara
A possible untapped route to harvesting company data is Wikipedia. The DBpedia project harvests structured data from Wikipedia and makes it available as a single, queryable Linked Data datasource. An example of the sorts of network that can be uncovered from independently maintained maintained Wikipedia pages is shown by this network that uncovers “influenced by” relationships between philosophers, as described on Wikipedia:
See Visualising Related Entries in Wikipedia Using Gephi and Mapping Related Musical Genres on Wikipedia/DBPedia With Gephi for examples of how to generate such maps directly from Wikipedia using the cross-platform Gephi application. For examples of the sorts of data available from DBpedia around companies, see:
Using Wikipedia – or otherwise hosted versions of the MediWiki application that Wikipedia sits on top of – there is great potential for using the power of the crowd to uncover the rich network of connections that exist between companies, if we can identify and agree on a set of descriptive relations that we can use consistently to structure data published via wiki pages…
The School of Data will go on expedition at this year’s Mozilla Festival. Join us on a quest through the worlds of data wrangling with the sherpas from the School of Data, OpenSpending and OKFN-labs.
Mozilla Festival is an annual un-conference to celebrate all things web. It happens from November 9-11. The School of Data team has a set of experienced Sherpas from all around the OKFN and will guide small groups of explorers into the realms of data…
Currently we are preparing to set out to three distinct expeditions:
- An expedition to the hidden islands of off-shore tax evasion,
- Drilling deep into the caverns of some of the extractive industries data and
- Responding to a call for help from three African nations to solve the mysterious drop in life expectancy they experienced
What is a ‘Data Expedition’?
Data expeditions are a experimental concept we at the School of Data have decided to try. They are hands on workshops with guidance and direction – however the participants (adventurers) are not lectured, they learn data-wrangling skills by being confronted with real life data, problems and questions. Our sherpas will guide their pack to useful data sources, tools and resources to help climb the data mountian, but exact routes taken and questions answered will be determined by the participants. In a Data Expedition, the amount you learn depends only on your ambition, we’re aiming to teach you how to learn, not to spoonfeed you answers. Be aware that if you keep wandering off into the woods there might be dragons (just to bring you back on the road).
Who can participate?
We’re looking for Adventurers and Explorers with skillsets ranging from storytelling via heavy code-forging to graphic design. All skill levels are needed and the more diverse the party the better chance to survive and complete the expeditions. Teaming up with people having different skillsets and levels will be beneficial for participants.
Will anyone die in the process?
Hopefully not. Data is generally safer than real blizzards, but can be equally overwhelming.
Where & When will the data expeditions happen?
Explorers and adventurers are welcome to join us on Saturday (10.11.2012) morning 10:00am at Mozfest.
sign up
Out data wrangler Michael Bauer is on tour through Tanzania and Ghana. His first stop: The African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC) TechCamp in Zanzibar. Read his impressions below.
How do you innovate the news? You bring a bunch of technology geeks and journalists to low bandwith paradise and let them bounce ideas off each other for three days. Sounds like a good idea? Well yes… it is.
The African News Innovation Challenge is a program to fund innovative ways of improving reporting and journalism in Africa. It was conceived by the African Media Initiative and right now is having it’s first round of funding. Forty projects were nominated as finalists and were invited to a three day barcamp-like event in beautiful Zanzibar.
The event, co-organized by the African News Innovation Challenge and the US State Department, brings together ANIC finalists, technology experts, journalists and civil society organizations to re-think and re-design their submissions. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Spending team – collaborating with the Open Institute – is one of the finalists in this challenge. So I got to serve a dual role: representing a partner in one of the finalist projects and facilitating sessions on Open Data, Freedom of Information and Models for Financial Reporting.
The first day started off with an intense set of sessions – from design thinking exercises in teams to deep sessions on specific technical or journalistic subjects. The challenge of participating in those was to select from a wide range of topics – most of them too interesting to miss. Conversations continued until late at night.
TechCamp will end October 8th. I’ll stay in Tanzania for an Open Data workshop in Dar from 18th-20th October and then move on to Ghana after this. If you’re interested meeting during that time, contact schoolofdata [@] okfn.org
Then, to keep the ball rolling, we’re following up with a virtual sprint on Thursday July 19th. Times for the virtual sprint:
4pm – 8pm UTC; 5pm – 9pm BST; 6pm-10pm CEST
9am – 1pm PDT; 10am – 2pm MDT; 11am – 3pm CDT; 12pm – 4pm EDT
How You Can Help
There are (at least!) three different ways for you to help with the handbook:
- Author a section – sign up to help write a section of the Data Wrangling Handbook. You can also add additional sections to the end of the document.
- Edit a section or sections
- Suggest tutorials & resources for the further reading of each section
Our last School of Data virtual sprint had over 60 participants, who reviewed and drafted courses, and suggested materials and resources. We’re looking forward to the success of the Data Wrangling Handbook Sprint!
Questions? Email: [email protected] or Twitter: @SchoolOfData