Question: What is the typical day of a School of Data fellow?

Happy: As a fellow, I spent a lot of time learning! The Fellowship really helped me to be brave and dive into the data… other than the events you have to do, a lot of it is a learning experience. It really never stops!

Yuandra: Usually, I meet with a lot of people – working with data is very new in my country, Indonesia, so there was lots of interest. I spent lots of time going from organisation to organisation, raising awareness of what they can do with data. Then, planning training – the materials, preparing them, thinking about how to package the materials in a way that people will understand.

Question: What skills are needed to be a School of Data fellow?

Milena: We’re looking for a diversity of skills among the fellows, we’re hoping each fellow will have a strong skill that they’ll be able to teach others, as well as be able to identify gaps in their own knowledge. We only have 7 spaces this year, which is fewer than last year, so it will (hopefully!) be a competitive process.

Codrina: It’s important to have some connections in your region, because the Fellowship (and School of Data) is not just about learning things for yourself, but then to take what you have learned and what you know, and spread it in your own geographical context. Or if you don’t already – be prepared to go around and meet lots of new organisations and build the community around you!

Yuandra: Community building is really important, you’ll be working with other organisations around you who definitely have the need for data. So is communication: my background is very technical, but this Fellowship taught me how to put my technical jargon aside, and explain issues in a simple way for newcomers to the topic.

Question: What kinds of projects did Fellows carry out?

Yuandra: I worked with Publish What You Pay (who work on extractive industries transparency), who previously only used data in Excel, and for reports. When I went there, one of my main points was to show them how they can use data in other ways, for example in visualisations and infographics. They’re still in an early stage of working with data, but they’ve come a long way!

Codrina: I’m a mapping person, so much of the work I did involved either building maps or teaching people how to use them, and how to stay away from usual map problems. I went to Bosnia & Herzegovina, and worked on election maps. If you’re ever curious about the most horrible election system in the world – take a look! We spent a week trying to work out how it works, we ended up asking people to explain the system in a 3 minute video, which worked really well.

Happy: I found that it’s hard to ‘sell’ open data to different CSOs just by explaining – so, I wanted to use my own organisation as a model, to demonstrate what exactly people can do with open data. It was a really good way actually for us to engage with government – you build trust, and partnerships with them, by teaching them what they can do with data. Now, the government are opening up datasets that they’ve never opened before – so this is really exciting for me.

Nisha: We did a data journalism workshop for people who are really not very technologically savvy – it was really rewarding because after a while of working with people who want to know more advanced stuff, you can forget there’s lots of people who still want to know the basics, so you get to open this whole new world to them. We also did a data expedition with an organisation that’s working in the urban space in Hyderabad, with data that they’d collected.

On Monday 16th February, our 2014 Fellows Codrina, Happy and Yuandra, from Romania, the Philippines, and Indonesia respectively, joined myself and Milena to talk through their experiences in last year’s fellowship.

Here’s the video online (just under an hour long):

And on Tuesday 17th February, Olu and Nisha, from Nigeria and India respectively, joined us to discuss their fellowship. Here’s their video, which is just over 30 minutes long:

Apply here

We have funding for 7 School of Data fellows to take part in our 2015 Fellowship Programme, and from previous experience, we’ve found that the fellowships work best when there is an established local host.

Who are we looking for?

School of Data is promoting data literacy by working with local partners to create impactful data-driven projects. We’re looking organisations that need support in using data more effectively and that are willing to work closely with one of our School of Data fellows over a 9 month period.

If you are selected, you’ll welcome a School of Data fellow in your office on a regular basis, to work on concrete projects and provide you with custom trainings and support, depending on what you need most. You’ll open up your data to the fellow, and allow them to see how you work with data now, help you guide your organisation towards being more data-savvy and using data to strengthen your work, be that in the field of advocacy, campaigning, journalism, or elsewhere within the civil society space. You’ll support the growth of the data-literate community, by inviting those within your network to attend trainings, and organising your own data expeditions, supported closely by the School of Data fellow.

What we expect you to contribute

This programme involves a great deal of resources and commitment from us, and we expect an equal amount of resources and commitment from our partners.

The ideal partner would be able to commit:

• To support the fellow’s work, objectives and their overall work with your organisation without overburdening them or putting them in difficult situations
• A good data driven project idea for what you want to achieve together with the fellow. This could be a specific data driven application (a web application, a website, an addition to an existing project or site, a mobile app), broader organisational support to use data, or any other feasible use for open data. The project must hold the potential to engage a large audience, to create a positive change for a community, region or country, and directly promote your organisation goals and objectives.
• A team to the project. We want to create sustainable projects, and work with you to achieve systemic change within your organisation. We can’t do this with only one person. We would like to work with the relevant team of people in your organisation, depending on your needs and capacity.
• In addition, we also welcome in kind or financial support for our fellowship programme. Our programme funds the work on the fellow, including a part time equivalent monthly stipend and some travel support but we appreciate additional support that can complement our programme. Get in touch to understand more about the type of support you can provide.

What you’ll get in return

If you are accepted as our local partner, we’ll ask for your assistance in selecting the best applicant to be the School of Data fellow who will work with you. The fellow will support you by:

• Evaluating your organisational capacity to work with data
• Delivering custom training and support for your organisation depending on your needs
• Working with you on a concrete data driven project,

Here is just an example of what our 2014 fellow Hannah Williams worked on together with local partners from South Africa: http://capetownbudgetproject.org.za/

Interested? Get in touch.

Apply here

Deadline: March 10th

You are also welcome to contact us on [email protected] while you are preparing your application; we’d be happy to answer your questions and help you put together a good application.

Apply here

Following our successful 2014 School of Data Fellowships, we’re opening today our Call for Applications for the 2015 Fellowship programme. As with last year’s programme, we’re looking to find new data trainers to spread data skills around the world.

As a School of Data fellow, you will receive data and leadership training, as well as coaching to organise events and build your community in your country or region. You will also be part of a growing global network of School of Data practitioners, benefiting from the network effects of sharing resources and knowledge and contributing to our understanding about how best to localise our training efforts.

As a fellow, you’ll be part of a nine-month training programme where you’ll work with us for an average of ten working days a month, including attending online and offline trainings, organising events, and being an active member of the thriving School of Data community.

Get the details

Our 2015 fellowship programme will run from April-December 2015. We’re asking for 10 days a month of your time – consider it to be a part time role, and your time will be remunerated. To apply, you need to be living in a country classified as lower income, lower-middle income or upper-middle income categories as classified here.

Who are we looking for?

People who fit the following profile:

• Data savvy: has experience working with data and a passion for teaching data skills.
• Social change: understands and interested in the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the media in bringing positive change through advocacy, campaigns, and storytelling.
• Has some facilitation skills and enjoys community-building (both online and offline) – or, eager to learn and develop their communication and presentation skills
• Eager to learn from and be connected with an international community of data enthusiasts
• Language: a strong knowledge of English – this is necessary in order to communicate with other fellows, to take part in the English-run online skillshares and the offline Summer Camp

To give you an idea of who we’re looking for, check out the profiles of our 2014 fellows – we welcome people from a diverse range of backgrounds, too, so people with new skillsets and ranges of experience are encouraged to apply.

This year, we’d love to work with people with a particular topical focus, especially those interest in working with extractive industries data, financial data, or aid data.

There are 7 fellowship positions open for the April to December 2015 School of Data training programme.

Geographical focus

We’re looking for people based in low-, lower-middle, and upper-middle income countries as classified by the World Bank, and we have funding for Fellows in the following geographic regions:

• One fellow from Macedonia
• One fellow from Central America – focus countries Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua
• One fellow from South America – focus countries Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador
• Two fellows based in African countries (ie. two different countries)
• Two fellows based in Asian countries (ie. two different countries)

What does the fellowship include?

As a School of Data fellow, you’ll be part of our 9-month programme, which includes the following activities:

• guided and independent online and offline skillshares and trainings, aimed to develop data and leadership skills,
• individual mentoring and coaching;
• an appropriate stipend equivalent to a part time role;
• Participation in the annual School of Data Summer Camp, which will take place in May 2015 – location to be confirmed.
• Participation in activities within a growing community of School of Data practitioners to ensure continuous exchange of resources, knowledge and best practices;
• Training and coaching of the fellow in participatory event management, storytelling, public speaking, impact assessment etc;
• Opportunities for paid work – often training opportunities arise in the countries where the fellows are based.
• Potential work with one or more local civil society organisations to develop data driven campaigns and research.

What did last year’s fellows have to say?

Check out the Testimonials page to see what the 2014 Fellows said about the programme, or watch our Summer Camp video to meet some of the community.

Support

This year’s fellowships will be supported by the Partnership for Open Development (POD) OD4D, Hivos, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Macedonia. We welcome more donors to contribute to this year’s fellowship programme! If you are a donor and are interested in this, please email us at [email protected].

Got questions? See more about the Fellowship Programme here and have a looks at this Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.– or, watch the Ask Us Anything Hangouts that we held in mid-February to take your questions and chat more about the fellowship.

Not sure if you fit the profile? Have a look at our 2013 and 2014 fellows profiles.. Women and other minorities are encouraged to apply.

Convinced? Apply now to become a School of data fellow. The application will be open until March 10th and the programme will start in April 2015.

The workshop was mainly led by Ali Rebaie, a Senior School of Data fellow, and Bahia Halawi, a data scientist at Data Aurora, along with the data community team assistants; Zayna Ayyad, Noor Latif and Hsein Kassab. The aim of the workshop was to give the students an introduction to the world of open data and data journalism, in particular, through tutorials on open source tools and methods used in this field. Moreover, we wanted to put students on track regarding the use of data.

On the first day, the students were introduced to data journalism, from a theoretical approach, in particular, the data pipeline which outlined the different phases in any data visualization project: find, get, verify, clean, analyze and present. After that, students were being technically involved in scraping and cleaning data using tools such as open refine and Tabula.

Day two was all about mapping, from mapping best practices to mapping formats and shapes. Students were first exposed to different types of maps and design styles that served the purpose of each map. Moreover, best mappings techniques and visualizations were emphasized to explain their relative serving purpose. Eventually, participants became able to differentiate between the dot maps and the choropleth maps as well as many others. Then they used twitter data that contained geolocations to contrast varying tweeting zones by placing these tweets at their origins on cartodb. Similarly, they created other maps using QGIS and Tilemill. The mapping exercises were really fun and students were very happy to create their own maps without a single line of code.

On the third day, Bahia gave a lecture on network analysis, some important mathematical notions needed for working with graphs as well as possible uses and case studies related to this field. Meanwhile, Ali was unveiling different open data portals to provide the students with more resources and data sets. After these topics were emphasized, a technical demonstration on the use of network analysis tool to analyze two topics was performed. Students were analyzing climate change and later, the AUB media group on Facebook was also analyzed and we had its graph drawn. It was very cool to find out that one of the top influencers in that network was among the students taking the training. Students were also taught to do the same analysis for their own friends’ lists. Facebook data was being collected and the visualizations were being drawn in a network visualization tool.

After completing the interactive types of visualizations, the fourth day was about static ones, mainly, infographics. Each student had the chance to extract the information needed for an interesting topic to transform it into a visual piece.  Bahia was working around with students, teaching them how to refine the data so that it becomes simple and short, thus usable for building the infographic design. Later, Yousif, a senior creative designer at Data Aurora, trained the students on the use of Photoshop and illustrator, two of the tools commonly used by infographic designers. At the end of the session, each student submitted a well done infographic of which some are posted below.

After the workshop Zayna had small talks with the students to get their feedback and here she quoted some of their opinions:

“It should be a full course, the performance and content was good but at some point, some data journalism tools need to be more mature and user-friendly to reduce the time needed to create a story,” said Jad Melki, Director of media studies program at AUB, “it was great overall.”

“It’s really good but the technical parts need a lot of time. We learned about new apps. Mapping, definitely I will try to learn more about it,” said Carla Sertin, a media student.

“It was great we got introduced to new stuff. Mapping, I loved it and found it very useful for me,” said Ellen Francis, civil engineering student. “The workshop was a motivation for me to work more on this,” she added, “it would work as a one semester long course.”

Azza El Masri, a media student, is interested in doing MA in data journalism. “I like it I expected it to be a bit harder, I would prefer more advanced stuff in scraping,” she added.

1. What you have done
2. What you are doing
3. Any lessons/obstacles
4. Bonus music tracks.

##A busy month full of data trainings

• In Philippines, Happy and Sam ran a Data Skills Training for the Civil Service Commission. They really enjoyed working with government employees who were so switched on. Keep an eye on this space for a follow up blog.

• In Nigeria, our Olu just rounded up the #OpenDataParty in Abuja, Nigeria November 28 and 29 where they had 116 registered participants coming from the six region of the country to teach, and learn about how to use data for advocacy (NGOs) and storytelling (journalists); For those of you who can’t wait for the blog post, here are some pictures: Looking for pictures from this event.

• In Peru, our fellow Antonio and Juan Manuel, master of all School of Data things in Latin America, hosted Meetup with HacksHackers about private data and open data. Antonio is also working on a visualisation of climate emergencies in Peru over tge last 10 years.

• In South Africa, Hannah is working on mapping the Cape Town budget for a beneficiary NGO, Ndifuna Ukwazi. For this she is experimenting with Carto DB, using a lot of their customisation functionalities.

• In Romania, Codrina worked on and listed an application for the OGP Romanian awards – Political Colours of Romania, and preparing an open geodata workshop in this project.

• In India, Nisha just finished a beginners workshop on data journalism and an open streets map mapping party with Mapbox. She is working on an online data journalism module and preparing a data expedition in Hyderabad with Milena.

• In Tanzania, our Joachim lead a Open Refine deep dive last week with President’s office , Public Service Management and is now organizing another Open Refine and QGIS deep dive session for next week with an educational agency in Dar es Salaam.

• In Macedonia, Dona and Milena organised a 2-day training in Macedonia covering basic data concepts, data analysis with spreadsheets and data visualisation. Here are some photos:

• In Hungary, Rita is in full preparation for next week’s two spreadsheet workshops for CSOs. This is the second series of spreadsheets training. Last time, the biggest challenge was assessing people’s skills to be able to tailor the training to their knowledge. This time, to be more accurate, the team has decided to require a few exercises to be completed, not just a self assessment survey.

• In Indonesia, Yuandra talked about the usage of data at an event in Bandung and helped PWYP Indonesia create their first infographic. He is currently preparing for skill sharing session this November and for a survey trip with PWYP to kalimantan.

##Some lessons learnt

• Never rely on internet at events! If possible bring a separate internet source to workshops like a internet dongle or a BRCK
• When organizing events be patients , especially when dealing with public servants!
• It’s never an easy task to find good datasets for trainings. We try to always use data that is relevant for our participants, that can get them to ask some interesting questions and is of course appropriate for the training.
• It’s also quite hard to assess the skills of your participants before the training. Over-rating their skills might get you disappointed or at least you’ll have to cut and do a lot of adjustment to your training.

##Bonus music from around the world

• From the Philippines
• About the fellowship coming to an end in a month (sad face)
•  Some creole music from Peru
•  Some strength to keep going

• Hannah, in South Africa, is helping Ndifuna Ukwazi create a map of Cape Town’s Budget, and testing out CartoDB.

• Siyabonga, also in South Africa, organised and hosted a data scraping workshop together with Tabula and import.io last week, and is coding a news app at the moment. Watch this space! Siya is also holding a skillshare on Thursday 27 Nov on User Experience for all things data- join the hangout here. The skillshare will take place at 1pm GMT/8am CST/9am EDT/6pm IST/8pm WIB.

• Dona, together with Milena, is doing a training later this week in Macedonia, covering mainly spreadsheets and visualisations. Today, they’re talking at an OGP forum on “Open Data as an opportunity for CSOs and businesses.”

• Last week Antonio and Ruben were in San Jose, Costa Rica, where they hosted a data expedition at the Open Government Partnership Americas Summit– you can see the projects that were created on the HackDash board, and more updates coming soon! This week Antonio is organising a meetup together with HacksHackers Lima, and Juan Manuel from Escuela de Datos and SocialTIC, will be joining him there!

• In Hungary, Rita is giving a presentation at a business intelligence conference today, and ran a regular beginner Python workshop last Sunday. Next week, she’ll be doing two reloaded spreadsheet workshops.

• Yuandra is working with Publish What You Pay Indonesia on building infographics, and on Friday will be talking in a community event regarding the use of open data in Bandung. He also took part in a national conference for CSOs on democracy, joining a panel to discuss data use in the fight for democracy.

• This week in the Philippines, Happy and Sam Leon have been training the Civil Service Commission – it sounds like they are all having a wonderful time, and Happy will be writing more about this very soon!

• Over in Romania, Codrina carried out the second workshop for the School of ACtivism, and did a presentation on open data at an OpenStreetMap conference in Brașov.

• In Tanzania, Joachim has been have following up with Tanzanian educational agencies suchas Ministry of Education and Vocational Training(MOEVT) and
  President’s Office, Public Service Management(PO-PSM) to revise and build on materials learned from the Education Data Dive workshop held in October. This week on Friday , he’ll meet up again with PO-PSM to dive deep into Open Refine and QGIS.

Wow. We’re super impressed with all the great work that the fellows are doing – we hope you are, too!