A couple of weeks ago, the Knowledge Unit, (Heather Leson, Anders Pedersen, Lucy Chambers, Milena Marin, Sam Leon, Zara Rahman and James Hamilton) met up in person for a face-to-face team meeting. You’ll be hearing about lots of the things that got discussed as we get through the (many!) post-it notes that were produced during the week; but for now, we wanted to share a few initial thoughts and learnings.

1. Taking the time to sit down and remember why we’re all here, and focus on all the great stuff that School of Data has done, is really important and a great motivator.

2. Thinking about our ‘users’ or ‘stakeholders’ can be confusing, but is important: who uses School of Data? We’ve thought about it in the past as simply civil society and journalists, but increasingly we’re seeing demand come from the government side, who are recognising that levels of data literacy among their staff is also low.

3. Out of everything we’ve done and delivered this year, we’re probably most proud of the 2014 School of Data fellowship scheme; we’re now working with 12 incredible data leaders from across the world, who we met up with in person during our first Summer Camp in Berlin this summer. We’re learning more from them than we ever could have imagined, and we hope that bringing together such stellar leaders from around the world is strengthening our collective data training skills!

4. We need to revamp our website: and this needs dedicated time and effort. However, due to limited human and financial resources and other firm commitments that our team has to deliver this year, we decided to postpone the revamping of the website for January 2015.

5. The curriculum is an octopus: we have so much curriculum material online, but it is very scattered! Lots of valuable training materials are hiding on the blog, in Google Docs somewhere, on individuals computers; we need to get better at collating and standardising this, so that others can use these materials and build upon them.

6. On a meta-level: we set high expectations of ourselves, and perhaps we work ourselves a little too hard. Looking after our own well-being is crucial to being able to perform at our highest ability at work – this could include things like taking time off even when we worry that we’ve got too much to do, or taking regular breaks at our laptops to reduce the risk of RSI.

7. We need to get better at documenting what we do: sitting down to write a blog post or a write-up of a training often falls to the bottom of the priority list, but this can cause us problems when we’re trying to prove that we are, in fact, doing a lot! We’re trying to do this better now ourselves and within the network, too.

8. Governance of the School of Data network is tricky, and we need advice on how to do it best: so, we’re going to seek advice from experts and build an Advisory Board. School of Data has grown so organically and so quickly that it’s almost taken us by surprise; but we want more than anything to make sure that engaged and active members of the School of Data community can shape the way that School of Data evolves in the future.

9. We’ve done some pretty great things this year; from launching the fellowship scheme, organising the first School of Data summer camp, to producing topic-specific curriculum, working with organisations such as Global Witness to produce influential data-driven advocacy work, seeing School of Data grow into 5 different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Greek), organising the School of Data journalism track in Perugia, not to mention tens (or hundreds?!) of workshops and training sessions literally across the world. And of course, none of this would be possible without the support and engagement of such a wonderful community, for which we are very grateful, humbled and honoured!

We hope you’ll join us on the next stage of the School of Data evolution, and we will of course be in touch with you very soon to gather your opinions and learn from your expertise. Thank you!

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)

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.

We began with a jargon-busting exercise, and working out where the common problems were that people in the room were facing. Common themes were accessibility, actual availability of the data and data validity.

There were also common terms that people had heard, but weren’t so sure about – as always, lots of acronyms! API, CSV, RSS, to name a few. Here are some others:

Next, we talked about a topic that often gets missed out in open data discussions: data ethics. Here, we didn’t just mean how to make sure your data is correct and you’re reporting things accurately, but also in terms of what data you’re publishing and working with, what you’re asking from the government, and how you deal with sensitive topics.

This topic sparked lots of discussions among the group; from wondering what to do with data that is available about the families of parliamentarians, to the line between what is considered ‘public’ and what is considered to be ‘private’ data, and questioning the role that cultural context has to play in making these judgements.

Especially as lots of the groups present work with election data, the question of public-private data – ie. data on those elected to public office – is particularly pertinent, and it definitely sounded like there was a lot more to be explored.

Next, Ramda gave us a quick run through of where to find data, including the new Indonesian data portal (I was happy to discover it’s running on CKAN, too!) – http://data.id. Lots of the participants had expressed a desire to delve into data visualisations, and Perludem were kind enough to provide us with an incrediblye 3000 pieces of Lego, so we were excited to run our first ‘offline data visualisation’ session, with Lego!

Some of our favourite offline visualisations:

Visualising the room: the group here gathered data on participants, and visualised it, by gender, and then looking at more detailed ‘features’ – how many of us were wearing glasses (45%) – rings (21%) – watches (33%) – and batik shirts (21%).

Visualising World Bank development indicators on Indonesia: (personally, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen done with World Bank data, ever!) – different economic indicators are shown visualised between two different years (the red and the yellow) – and, it’s all shaped into the rough shape of Indonesia!

And, the loudest cheer went to the group who used paper as well as lego, to visualise commodity prices in Indonesia!

The next day was dedicated mainly to taking those offline visualisation skills online, using Datawrapper and Infogr.am. Here, we saw the importance of cleaning the data, and of organising the data correctly in terms of rows and columns (the ‘transpose’ feature on Datawrapper was greatly appreciated!)

You can see a list of infographics and visualisations created by participants here, and we’ve embedded a couple of our favourites at the bottom of this post.

We also learned about APIs, and started planning for future plans of working with election data in Indonesia, in a great interactive session facilitated by Perludem.

Big thanks to our hosts Perludem, and the Asia Foundation for their financial support for the event. We hope to see you all very soon!

– which shows gender split between members of the regional legislative parliament.

Number of violations in the Presidential Elections:

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 :

1. 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
2. Creating an i-reporting system that allows citizen reporting during disasters to Nigeria Emergency Management Agency
3. 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!

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)

Sunday, August 31st, DataMeet worked with an Economic Times Journalist Jayadevan PK with support from School of Data, to design an intro to data journalism workshop. For a while now there has been quite a bit of interest and discussion of data journalism in India. Currently there are a few courses and events around promoting data journalism, we thought there was definitely room to start to build a few modules on working with data for storytelling. Given that we have not done too many of these we decided to do an introduction and leave it limited to a few people.

You can see the agenda with notes here and the resources we shared on the data journalism resource wiki page, as well as refer to the data catalog that DataMeet has been putting together.

Thanks to Knolby Media for hosting us and for School of Data for the support. Thank you to Vikras Mishra for volunteering and taking notes, pictures, and video.

We had four story tellers with us, from various backgrounds. We spent the morning doing introduction and what was their experience with data, what their definition of data journalism is and why they wanted to take this workshop. Then we had them put up some expectations so we can gauge what the afternoon should focus on.

We then had Jaya go through the context of data journalism in terms of the world scale and the new digital journalism era.

Then we spent some time going over examples of good data journalism and bad.

After we went through resources people can use to get data. We touched upon the legal issues around using data and copyright issues. Then we discussed accuracy and how to properly attribute sources.

Then we demonstrated a few tools

Tableau
CartoDB
Scraping tools
– Scraper wiki
– IMACROS
MapBox
QGIS

Visualization Roadmap
The participants thought understanding how to visualize would be helpful.  So we went through a sort of visualization roadmap.  Then went through stories they were working on to see how we would create a visualization and also how to examine the data and come up with a data strategy for each story.

Then showed some more tools to address the suggestions from the exercise.
– BHUVAN
– Timelines
– Odyssey
– Fusion Tables
– BUMP

Feedback session

People wanted another day to let the lessons be absorbed and some more time to actually have hands on time with the tools.  Also even at the intro level it is important to make people come prepared with stories, so they have something to apply the ideas to.

To say we learned a lot is an understatement. We will definitely be planning more intro workshops and hopefully more advanced workshops in the future, we hope to continue to learn what people think is important and will keep track and see what kinds of stories come out of these learning session.

Network Mapping Resources:

Here are some resources provided by Nisha and the team to get you started on your Network Mapping journey:

• Network-Centric Advocacy (Marty Kearns) (PDF)
• Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change (PDF)
• A good example: WWF
• A good slideshare on stakeholder mapping
• DIYToolkit
• Open DRI Field Guide

Network Mapping – Nisha Thompson

We’ll be hosting more School of Data Fellow Skillshares in the coming weeks. See our wiki for more details.

Title image: Social network in a course CC-by Hans Põldoja, on Flickr

The School of Data Summer Camp was held on July 18 – 21, 2014 at Villa Adlon in Potsdam, Germany. There we collaborated to build School of Data with all the participants: partners, network leaders, local instances, fellows, senior fellows, funders, special guests and staff. The 4-day event with 47 people focused on individual and community growth with participatory activities in a programme consisting of conversations, documenting, skillshares, brainstorming, networking, and gamestorming.

Here is a small window into the spirit of Summer Camp:

(Video by Social Tic’s Juan Manual Casanueva)

Thank you

The house, lake, gardens and complete environment provided a perfect setting to unite people for School of Data Summer Camp. We would like to extend a very special thanks to our host Mathilda Huss of Villa Adlon. She generously provided the beautiful location.

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.

We are all taking a much needed rest and then will begin to share more about the next steps for School of Data. Thanks again to everyone who made School of Data Summer camp so special.