About School of Data Summer Camp

The School of Data Summer Camp brought together local initiatives and School of Data Fellows to build the foundation for a buzzing and productive coming year. Last year we kicked off a Spanish, French, Portuguese and Greek site as well as local initiatives around the world. On a more individual level we’ve been working with fellows worldwide to bring data skills to their communities. With a new round of fellows coming we want to get together and unify our vision, goals and methods. Our goal was to make everyone go home with better skills and a clear vision where we’ll take the School of Data together!

Special thanks goes to our funders who made all of this possible: Partnership for Open Data (World Bank, Open Data Institute, and Open Knowledge), Hewlett Foundation, Open Society Foundations, IndigoTrust, the British Embassy Skopje, Hivos, and SEATTI.

(Video Created by Sam Muirhead of Camera Libre)

LONDON, 17 June 2014—The Transparency and Accountability Initiative is proud to launch a practical new guide for transparency campaigners planning and executing technology projects.

Fundamentals for Using Technology in Transparency and Accountability Organisations presents clear, step-by-step guidance to the key phases in a technology project, from defining your strategy, to spending wisely, to tracking outcomes.

The guide is also designed to help funders identify projects with the potential to succeed and provide effective support to grantees.

Too often, technology projects burn money and staff time, but still lack impact. In ‘Fundamentals,’ author Dirk Slater and experts from our TABridge network distil years of experience into the principles and steps that drive success in technology projects.
The guide will help you:

• Clarify why you’re creating your technology project and how it contributes to your overall organisational strategy.
• Ensure you have the internal capacity and external expertise to manage the project.
• Build in early and regular evaluations of your progress so that rather than end up with an expensive failure, you can detect problems early and adjust as you go.

Vanessa Herringshaw, director of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, said:

“Digital tools have great potential to improve transparency, but if we’re honest, it’s also really easy to get it wrong. Developing technologies to expose corruption and engage citizens in the fight for accountable government demands significant resources, but without smart planning, money gets wasted and opportunities get lost. The guide is a roadmap for NGOs and funders who want to get tech right.”

“Technology is not a panacea,” said Rakesh Rajani, civil society co-chair of the Open Government Partnership and head of East African CSO Twaweza, “It is one piece in larger social change. T/AI’s ‘Fundamentals’ guide addresses the reality that tools that don’t match the local context or aren’t linked into other approaches can’t solve the deep problems that weaken government accountability or citizen mobilization alone. The guide seeks to help people think through these needs and linkages, and make more effective choices.”

‘Fundamentals’ is presented in six chapters, which can be used separately or as a unit:

• Are You Ready to Start a Tech Project?
• What We’ve Learned from Impact Case Studies: The Importance of Strategy
• The Tech Strategy
• Tech Project Planning and Management
• Checklist for Funders of Tech Projects
• Integrating “Evaluation” and Learning

It also includes appendices that help organisations to match technology tactics to different stakeholders; ensure that projects are guided by a user-centred approach; ask the right questions when planning mobile-based outreach; and enlist data and open data effectively for advocacy.

To support our community of practice and deepen the impact of the guide, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative is hosting a series of webinars this spring and summer, based on the guide’s key recommendations.

For easy use, ‘Fundamentals’ is available to read online or to download in full or chapter by chapter. Learn more and get started at: http://tech.transparency-initiative.org/fundamentals.

The third edition of our School of Data Journalism is happening soon. Rahul Ghosh investigated the impact of our previous Schools of Data Journalism, and this is what he found out.

Held in the beautiful Italian hilltop city of Perugia, the annual five-day International Journalism Festival has grown into the largest event of its kind in Europe, with almost 50,000 participants in 2013. The Festival, uniquely free of charge for all participants, is known for its informal and participatory approach.

The Festival is an extraordinary opportunity to listen, learn, and network with many of the best journalists around the world. To name just a few, speakers in the past have included Aron Pilhofer, Emily Bell, Seymour Hersh, Mathew Ingram, Harper Reed, Paul Steiger, and Pulitzer Prize winners Steve Doig and Sarah Cohen.

Since 2012, Open Knowledge and the European Journalism Centre (EJC) have been invited to run the School of Data Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. The School of Data Journalism track runs a series of panels and workshops at the festival, designed to introduce data journalism to beginners. In this age of information, Open Knowledge aims to provide change makers around the world (like journalists and civil society organisations) with the appropriate set of skills and tools to gather, analyse, interpret, and visualise data and to turn it into useful insights to benefit citizens and society.

In 2012, the Data Journalism Handbook was also launched at the festival. The Handbook was the result of another collaboration between Open Knowledge and the EJC, with contributions from data journalists from top media institutions, including the BBC, the Financial Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.

The growing field of data journalism in Italy

In the last the decade, with the traditional model of journalism in crisis, data journalism has caught the imagination of journalists around the world. In data journalism, data – which we can also think of as digital information – can be either the source or a tool for storytelling and, at times, may be used for both. With the sheer scale and range of digital information now available and the tools being developed to process this information, it has become vital to journalism and storytelling itself.

Data journalism is still relatively new to Italy, though there is already a small but vibrant and growing community of advocates. Guido Romeo, Data & Business Editor at Wired Italy, has been one of the organisers at festival for the last couple of years, leading various panel discussions and workshops on data journalism. Romeo feels that the School of Data journalism has become “one of the main assets” of the festival.

“I teach in several journalism schools in Italy. You won’t get this sort of exposure to such teachers and tools in any journalism school in Italy. They bring in the most avant-garde people and have a keen eye on what’s innovative and new. It has definitely helped me understand what others around the world in big newsrooms are doing and, more importantly, how they are doing it,” he said.

Romeo explained that the School of Data Journalism’s work has been most influential in raising the profile of data journalism in Italy and in helping him and others in Italy to take the necessary practical steps needed to fully embrace the field. He explains that until last year there was not a single newsroom in Italy that had a data journalism unit.

Romeo emphasised how inspiring it was, especially for young journalists, to meet the top journalists from around the world and be able to freely share experiences and listen to their advice in an informal atmosphere.

Elisabetta Tola, an Italian freelance researcher and data journalist, has been both a participant and panel speaker at the School of Data Journalism’s sessions. She agrees with Romeo that the School of Data’s journalism’s seminars and workshops have helped inspire journalists in Italy to become aware of open data and enter the field of data journalism.

“Apart from the useful things you learn at the seminars and workshops, the exposure and networking is also very beneficial. Most of my students – I teach in two places, one the School of Journalism and the other a Masters in Science Communication course – were so enthusiastic after the event that they became part of the open data movement in Italy. One of them did her Masters thesis in Data Journalism, others becoming active by attending regular hackathons and things like that, and collaborating with others on data journalism projects,” she said.

Next up: the impact of the School of Data Journalism.