We are grateful for the interest from partners and members in the School of Data community. A special thank you to the more than 200 applicants who applied to join the programme.
Meet the School of Data Fellows
Antonio Cucho Gamboa, Peru
Antonio is a specialist in website development – as a PHP and Python programmer. He is the founder of the Open Data community Peru and Co-organizer of Hacks / Hackers Lima. Participate in projects Open Data, Data Journalism. In Juny 2013 I participated in AbreLatam 2013 in Montevideo, Uruguay with my project Lima I/O (DAL Regional Winner 2012). In February 2014 I organized a Open Data Day Peru, we had workshops, hackaton and talks about open data. Also in March 2014 I went to Montevideo, Uruguay to participated in the first Databootcamp for journalists. This year, I’m teaching open data tools in some workshops for journalists, citizens and NGO’s.
Codrina Illie
Codrina is a PhD Student at the Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest working within the Groundwater Engineering Research Center “CCIAS”. She is actively promoting free and open source software for geospatial and she is a dynamic supporter of the open data movement in Romania through her work within the geo-spatial.org community. Codrina is part of the GEodata Openness Initiative for Development and Economic Advancement in ROmania project team. The main objective of GEOIDEA.ro is to improve the scientific basis for open geodata model adoption in Romania. The project is built on the strong believe that publishing government geodata in Romania over the Internet, under an open license and in a reusable format can strengthen citizen engagement and yield new innovative businesses, bringing substantial social and economic gains. You can follow her on twitter.
Dona Djambaska, Macedonia
Dona graduated in the field of Environmental Engineering and has been working with the Metamorphosis foundation in Skopje for the past 6 years in assisting on projects in the field of information society. There she has focused on organising trainings for computer skills, social media, online promotion, photo and video activism. Dona is also an active contributor and member of the Global Voices Online community. She dedicates her spare time to artistic and activism photography.
Hannah Williams, South Africa
Hannah is a graphic designer working in both web and print. She also does copy writing now and again and have worked on a couple of public art projects. Recently she she has been trying to focus more on doing work that has a positive social impact. You can find some of her work here: http://www.hannahwilliams.co.za
Happy Feraren, the Philippines
Happy Feraren is the co-founder and CEO of Bantay.ph – a Manila based civil society organization (CSO) that monitors the quality of service in frontline government offices through volunteer reports. Along with the rest of her team, Bantay.ph has engaged over 100 student volunteers to monitor their local government offices and check for compliance of service standards mandated by the law. Her CSO aims to uplift the standard of public service and create a culture of active citizenship. Happy finished a degree in Literature at the De La Salle University, Manila before pursuing a career in advertising. After 4 years in the industry, she decided to leave advertising to work full time in the development sector. She is also a member of Manila’s premiere improvisational theater group, SPIT (Silly People’s Improv Theater). As a member of the group, she has performed in international improv festivals, conducted training modules for corporations, and developed special immersive theater shows. She also has diverse local and international experience in the fields of education, tourism, broadcasting, and HR training.
Joachim Mangilima, Tanzania
Joachim Mangilima is a technology and data enthusiast with a passion for using technology and data in addressing the most common problems facing communities around the world. He is active in consulting in the areas of development, deployment and management of mobile and web-based solutions and systems for decision support, data collection, analysis and management. Joachim is also the Co-founder and Co-manager of Google Developer Group (GDG), Dar es Salaam, a group of technology enthusiasts and software developers who are interested in open source technology with a bias in Google’s developer technology; this includes everything from the Android, App Engine, and Google Chrome platforms, to product APIs like the Maps API, YouTube API and Google Calendar API. Joachim holds a Bachelor of Science degree from University of Dar es Salaam majoring in Computer Science and Statistics with a minor in Economics.
Nisha Thompson, India
Nisha is currently working as Lead Organizer of a new organization called DataMeet, which is a community of people who are working towards open data by sharing experiences and helping others with data related problems. Datameet is hosting meetups and Open Data Camps around the country to promote dialogue about the use of data for civic purposes. Nisha moved to India in 2010 and worked with the India Water Portal to open up water data and worked with partners on the ground to improve the use and management of data. She also co-wrote a report on Open Government Data in India with the Centre for Internet and Society located in Bangalore. Previously she has worked with the Sunlight Foundation, in the United States, as social media and community organizer.
Oludotun Babayemi, Nigeria
Oludotun Babayemi has 5 years experience in the nonprofit sector and a Masters degree in Information Management. He is a Monitoring and Evaluation Expert with Connected Development [CODE], and the Lead Development Consultant with Cloneshouse Nigeria. He is a Microsoft Certified Information Technology Professional and presently a USAID and Google sponsored CrisisMapper Fellow. Oludotun Babayemi is working on monitoring and evaluation systems [such as the Follow The Money and the Education Budget Tracker] that could be used in putting pressure on governments and organizations in developing countries to be more responsive to demands from internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness and delivery of tangible results. He has worked in participatory mapping projects with UNOCHA during the Libya Crisis, UNOSAT in the Post Libya Crisis Geotagging , WHO in the health facility registry post-Libya Crisis, Amnesty International-US during the Syria Uprising, UNSPIDER in the Samoa Simulation Exercise, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Simulation Exercise and also with USAID on the mapping of poverty alleviation projects around the world. He was the Geo-Team Lead with Humanity Road using his expertise in information communications in disasters and humanitarian relief support.
Rita Zágoni, Hungary
Rita is a programmer with social science background. She has worked in IT management and web development before joining the Economics department of Central European University, where she is in charge of parsing unstructured, free text data to create analyzable format. Wandering across these fields she has gained some experience in website development, text processing and statistics using mainly Python, Java and MySQL.
Ruben Moya, Mexico
Ruben studied computer science at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UDG). He is currently freelancing developing web applications. He is a follower of technology and love to see new places. In the past months he has given lectures on code optimization, and have been teaching basic and advanced programming and developing. He also manages the programming of online conferences (hangouts) and online courses on various topics of technology, development and design.
Siyabonga Africa, South Africa
Siyabonga is from the east coast of South Africa but is currently living in Gauteng and working as a data visualization lead developer at Apehllion. His career has its roots in public administration and journalism from the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch University respectively. He completed his masters in new media design at Indiana University before returning to South Africa in 2012.
Yuandra Ismiraldi, Indonesia
Yuandra is a full stack mobile engineer and game developer from Indonesia. He holds a bachelor and master degree in software engineering, and started his career working with several startups in mobile and gaming space. He became interested in open data after participating in a hackathon about open data. Thinking that open data is a very interesting field, he is currently expanding his skill set to the world of open data and feels that information technology can become a great tool for open data.
Delivery partners
The Fellowship Programme is developed and delivered with Code for Africa, Social-Tic (Mexico) and Publish What You Pay Indonesia.
Funding partners
The School of Data Fellowship is made possible thanks to the generous support from the World Bank through the Partnership for Open Data, Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO), Hivos, Indigo Trust, Southeast Asia Technology and Transparency Initiative (SEATTI), The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Open Society Foundations.
Yesterday – 10th June, we closed our first ever round of applications for fellows. We are astounded by the response and wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who applied and everyone who helped with the outreach!
This is a quick post to slice and dice our applications data and to let applicants know about the next steps!
Image credits: Alex France on Flickr
We received over 200 applications from 51 different countries, here’s how they sliced up:
Applications by region:
Africa – 55
Asia- 45
Europe – 30
Latin America -52
MENA – 8
Not eligible/ Duplicate – 11
We’re also delighted to announce a large number of female applicants – approximately ⅓ of applicants. While we will clearly work to make sure we achieve even better than this in terms of equality, we are delighted to see such a promising start from our first round of applications!
What’s next?
The School of Data team and the crack team of local experts from each region will be combing the applications in the next few days. Shortlisted applicants will receive an email in the next few days requesting an interview with the team.
All candidates will be evaluated according to the same criteria. As a refresh, here’s what they are:
- Overall impression
- Teaching potential
- Skills and experience
- Potential to support NGOs and/ or journalists
- Bonus points (as we mentioned before – things like superb videos or quirky application methods etc will be looked upon favourably)
What if I didn’t get selected or wasn’t eligible?
Don’t despair! We’re working on two major areas:
1) An enhanced community programme, which will outline lots of ways to get involved with School of Data. Watch this space or sign up for the newsletter below.
2) The next round of fellowship applications, we hope to be able to run this programme again – hopefully with a wider selection of countries. Watch this space!
Don’t want to miss an announcement? Sign up for the School of Data newsletter!
The toolkit will act as a hub around open development, bringing together tools and training materials in one place. The toolkit’s content will be focused on increasing data literacy among civil society and journalists in aid-receiving countries, and it is envisioned that much of it will have a high reuse factor among other audiences.
To begin with, the toolkit will focus on data that is available around the aid sector. In large part thanks to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), there is a lot of data out there, but it is not being used by those living in countries affected most by aid. We hope that providing easy-to-follow and simple training materials (in the style of other School of Data courses), together with accompanying tools, will be a good way to bring together the community around development data.
There are already many data portals and tools around aid data, and this is where we’ll begin—by curating training documentation around these and seeing where the gaps are in tools that already exist. We won’t be building anything from scratch but rather building upon the great work that has been done by others in the sector and learning from their experiences to try and make it as easy as possible for newcomers to the data to access and really make the most of what’s available.
In addition to curation and community-building, the toolkit will also have a software aspect. Where gaps have been identified, we’ll be building open-source, interoperable, modular tools to fill those gaps. Development of these tools will be very user-centric: we’ll be starting from user needs, and that means we’ll be relying heavily on community input, so keep an eye out!
We’d love to hear from the target audience—civil society and journalists in aid-receiving countries—and find out what their needs are and where gaps have been found. We’d also love to work together in developing an aid curriculum for School of Data. If you have any workshop or training session opportunities coming up, let us know.
We’re looking for funding for specific parts of the toolkit that are yet to be built: development of specific open-source tools, translation of materials, and further developing prototype tools. Please get in touch if you’d like to further discuss any funding opportunities.
For more information, please see the Open Development Toolkit site (under construction!), and to be kept updated on progress on the Toolkit, sign up to the Open Development mailing list.
If you have any other questions, drop Zara an email on zara.rahman[at]okfn.org. We look forward to your input!
What if we had a world of data makers? In 2013, our School of Data team has trained over 1000 people around the world. Our goal is to keep up this momentum by training more data makers and supporting them better through a network of mentors. With that, we’ve been ramping up our efforts by seeking more funding. We are very proud to be considered one of the 196 candidates in the Making All Voices Count Grand Challenge.
Steve Kenei of Development Initiatives leading a School of Data Training in Nairobi, Kenya (November 2013)
Making All Voices Count is a global initiative that supports innovation, scaling, and research to deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness.
This Grand Challenge focuses global attention on creative and cutting-edge solutions, including those that use mobile and web technology, to ensure the voices of all citizens are heard and that governments have the capacity, as well as the incentive, to listen and respond.
“We’re blown away by the number of high-quality proposals. The competition has gained the interest of top designers and developers, and we’re intrigued to see which ideas resonate most with the public” Mathias Antonsson (Programme Manager, Ushahidi’s Innovation Component).
Where we trained this year – help us bring School of Data near you! Vote for us.
Our Making Voices Count Submission
We want to create School of Data where you are. Join the international network of Schools of Data, share our resources and tools, teach your community to better understand how data can help them achieve the change they want.
School of Data gives you the chance to learn how to use data to advance your agenda. Get new skills to find, clean, interpret and analyse data. Tell your stories. Get School of Data in your language and your country.
As more governments are making commitments to publish the data they collect. We need to empower citizens with the skills to turn data into actions. Whether you aim at increasing transparency and accountability, empower citizens to engage with governments or improve services and to advocate for change – the School of Data has something for you. The feedback loop between government and citizens can only be catalysed by empowering media, civil society and individual changemakers to understand and use data that has been released. People need skills to find, clean, interpret and analyse data in order to gather the evidence, create the visualisations, tell the stories and ultimately add force to their arguments for change. School of Data is a critical tool in this process of empowerment, providing participatory data training and online tools to empower people to achieve their desired social, political or environmental change.
Vote for the School of Data Now!
Hop over to the Ideas site, create an account and start voting. The competition is tough.
We’re fans of all the world changing folks!
The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is pleased to announce that registration is now open for its free online data journalism course Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools.
This five-module introductory course gives participants the essential concepts, techniques and skills to effectively work with data and produce compelling stories under tight deadlines. It is open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection who wants to tell stories with data.
This EJC initiative is supported by Google, the Dutch Ministry of Education and the African Media Initiative, and features a stellar line-up of instructors and advisors from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the New York Times, ProPublica, Wired, Twitter, La Nacion Argentina, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Zeit Online, and others.
Josh Hatch, Senior Editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and member of the Advisory Board for this course, says:
“Thanks to the European Journalism Centre’s work to foster data journalism’s move into the mainstream, reporters and editors can gain insights from the best in the business. Whether you want to get over your fear of Excel, learn the language of your data geeks, or discover how to tell stories with data visualisations, this course will help journalists and newsrooms learn how to take advantage of these invaluable skills. This is a very good thing.”
The course is planned to start early 2014 and the instruction language will be English. More details about the course and how to register are available at: www.datadrivenjournalism.net/course.
Can’t wait to get started? Refresh your skills by reading the European Journalism Centre and Open Knowledge Foundation’s earlier project, the Data Journalism Handbook before the course starts or stay in touch with happenings in the Data Journalism World via the Data Journalism Mailing List.
We are very excited to announce that this weekend we are joining our friends from the Open Knowledge Foundation Brazil in Rio de Janeiro to launch our newest project School of data in Portuguese.
The Website will launch at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Rio de Janeiro, 12 – 15 October 2013, followed by more meetups and events in both Rio and Sao Paulo, including of course a data expedition.
About Escola de Dados
Following the success of Escuela de Datos, we are now ready to provide Brazilians & Portuguese with School of Data methodologies and materials in their native language.
Like its English and Spanish speaking sisters, Escola de Datos will be driven by the same principles of learning by doing, running data expeditions, data clinics and hands-on online tutorials. All content and activities will be driven by local organisations and mentors and will be tailor made for the Brazilian and Portuguese context.
Who is behind Escola de Dados?
The project will be led by Open Knowledge Foundation Brazil under the supervision of our capable Everton Zanella Alvarenga and with the with the support of a number of dedicated volunteers like Marco Tulio Pires, Natalia Mazotte, Daniela Mattern and João Batista. Have a closer look here at the Escola de Dados team here.
Get involved
We are still at the beginning and every contribution is welcome! Here are few things you can do to get involved:
- Help us translate and localise more materials
- Contribute to our Blog in Portuguese with articles, case-studies and tutorials which could inspire or help NGOs or Journalists to work with Data.
- Help us run data expeditions and trainings as a local School of Data Mentor. If interested, apply directly here.
Stay in touch
So if you want to contribute or just stay in touch you can:
- Drop us a line on: escoladedados [at] okfn.org
- Follow us on @Escoladedatos
- Join our mailing list
This post is cross-posted from Moran Barkai’s post on DataDrivenJournalism.net.
The Data Journalism Handbook has reached a new milestone today with the publication of its third translation, into French, entitled Guide du datajournalisme.
The handbook is a free, collaborative book that aims to help journalists use data to improve journalism. It provides inspiring examples from news organisations across the world and a collection of tips and techniques from leading journalists, professors, software developers and data analysts. The book is the product of a collaboration between the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation and was published in its original English version about a year ago.
Translated by the French publisher Eyrolles and edited by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, CEO and co-founder of Journalism++, and Editorial Board member of this website, the French edition is augmented with recent examples from French and Belgian publications such as Le Monde, Rue89 and France Soir.
Cover of Guide du datajournalisme, based on graphics by Kate Hudson.
For Kayser-Bril, the need to publish a French edition of the book stems from the particular position of the French press. “France has some of the most pure-players in the news market. French journalists have done many innovating investigations in the past few years. Despite these very positive developments, the feeling still looms that francophone journalism is coming late to the technology party. The French version of the handbook, adding examples from France and Belgium to the original book, gives the French-speaking data journalism community a uniting reference point. The online adaptation, open-sourced on GitHub, will be improved and updated by the community itself to prepare the next versions of the handbook”, said Kayser-Bril.
The French translation of the graphic by Lulu Pinney, showing what is in the book.
Jean Abbiateci, a French freelance journalist and one of the winners of this year’s edition of the Data Journalism Awards, is one of the new authors added to the list of over 70 contributors to the book. In the case study entitled “Une pige de ‘scraping olimpique'”, Abbiateci recounts his work on obtaining and cleaning data for an application for the national public radio, France Info, dedicated to the London 2012 summer Olympics.
Hardcopies of the French edition of the handbook can be purchased from the website of Eyrolles. The book is freely available online on Journalism++ and the /source can be found on GitHub.
A Russian and a Spanish translation of the handbook have already been published and three other translations, into Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese, are in progress and will be published later this year.
Let’s also welcome another new member of the School of Data team, Neil Ashton.
You may remember Neil as the editor of the blog’s Data Roundup for the first half of 2013. Neil has now joined the Open Knowledge Foundation as a writer and analyst and will be working on School of Data as well as other OKF projects. His mission is to improve project documentation and to bring the OKF’s work to a wider audience.
Neil is fresh out of graduate school, where he studied computational linguistics. Through his research, he has written on topics ranging from the grammar of Tocharian pronouns to probabilistic logic programming. Neil lives in Toronto with his wife and newborn son.
Neil can be reached at [email protected].
This is a quick introductory post to welcome Milena Marin to the School of Data team.
Milena is based in London and joined Open Knowledge Foundation as Project and Workshop Coordinator for School of Data. Among others, she will be working with and supporting local partners, building the School of Data network around the world, and organising events, workshops and trainings.
Before joining us, she worked for over 4 years with Transparency International (TI) as Data and Technology Coordinator. Milena led the documentation of legal aid provided by TI’s Legal Advice Centres, ensuring an effective use of technology during this process, as well as supporting local partners with their data collection and analysis challenges. She was also responsible for coordinating and promoting the use of technology and the development anti-corruption solutions and tools across the TI Movement.
You can contact Milena at milena.marin [at] okfn.org or and follow her on Twitter.
The latest from what we are up to at the School of Data.
School of Data goes Spanish
Next month, a couple of the team will be headed over to Latin America for a series of warm-up events for the launch of the Spanish version of School of Data. The School will be launched at the AbreLatam conference in Uruguay.
On their way to Uruguay, they will be passing through Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Know an organisation or amazing individual doing great things with data they should meet up with on the way? Please drop us a line on schoolofdata [at] okfn.org.
Thank you to the amazing organisations and individuals who are helping to make this happen, including Social-TIC (Mexico), DATA (Uruguay), the Knight Media Fellows and the Hacks/Hackers network.
Data Clinics
Over at, OpenSpending, Anders Pedersen is running bi-weekly data clinics to help people troubleshoot their spending data, from getting better data, to cleaning, analysing and visualising the data.
The next clinic will happen on Wednesday 19th June in the evening.
Have data you want to bring along to troubleshoot? Join the OpenSpending mailing list, or email info [at] openspending.org for more details on the upcoming clinics.
Data Expeditions
Mapping the Garment Factories
Some participants of the Mapping the Garments Factories expedition couldn’t get enough and carried on their expedition into the week. A few participants have written a writeup of their expedition, concluding:
“major retailers like Wal-Mart maintains high levels of opacity around their supply chain and audit standards, which are detrimental to improving working standards in the garment industry.”
Tax Avoidance
Our tax avoidance teams pair up. We’ve paired up techies and storytellers to tackle the challenge of finding tax avoiders and evaders. Welcome also to our first Spanish-speaking group, who will take on the challenge. The expedition launches tomorrow, we will keep you posted with updates!
Call for ideas for topics
Have an idea for a topic you think would make a great expedition? (Or, even better – keen to help us lead one?) Please drop us a line on schoolofdata [at] okfn.org.
From the Blog
- John Murtagh’s Fantastic Data Roundup
- Data Diva, Michael Bauer has been on the road, training, training, training in Prague, Barcelona and Accra.
- Analysing UK Lobbying Data Using OpenRefine by Tony Hirst.