Uncategorized – Школа за податоци – Македонија http://mk.schoolofdata.org Доказите се моќ Wed, 06 Jul 2016 14:00:18 +0000 mk-MK hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.2 113300779 Breaking the Knowledge Barrier: The #OpenData Party in Northern Nigeria http://mk.schoolofdata.org/2014/10/01/breaking-the-knowledge-barrier-the-opendata-party-in-northern-nigeria/ http://mk.schoolofdata.org/2014/10/01/breaking-the-knowledge-barrier-the-opendata-party-in-northern-nigeria/#respond Wed, 01 Oct 2014 13:54:50 +0000 http://mk-schoolofdata.scoda.okfn.org/?p=8974 If the only news you have been watching or listening to about Northern Nigeria is of the Boko Haram violence in that region of Nigeria, then you need to know that other news exist, like the non-government organizations and media, that are interested in using the state and federal government budget data in monitoring service delivery, and making sure funds promised by government reach the community it was meant for.

This time around, the #OpenData party moved from the Nigeria Capital – Abuja to Gusau, Zamfara and was held at the Zamfara Zakat and Endowment Board Hall between September Thursday, 25 and Friday, 26, 2014. With 40 participant all set for this budget data expedition, participants included the state Budget Monitoring Group (A coalition of NGOs in Zamfara) coordinated by the DFID (Development for International Development) State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI),other international NGOs such as Society for Family Health (SFH), Save the Children, amongst others.

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Group picture of participants at the #OpenData Party in Zamfara

But how do you teach data and its use in a less-technology savvy region? We had to de-mystify teaching data to this community, by engaging in traditional visualization and scraping – which means the use of paper artworks in visualizing the data we already made available on the Education Budget Tracker. “I never believed we could visualize the education budget data of the federal government as easy as what was on the wall” exclaimed Ahmed Ibrahim of SAVI

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Visualization of the Education Budget for Federal Schools in Zamfara

As budgets have become a holy grail especially with state government in Nigeria, of most importance to the participants on the first day, was how to find budget data, and processes involved in tracking if services were really delivered, as promised in the budget. Finding the budget data of the state has been a little bit hectic, but with much advocacy, the government has been able to release dataset on the education and health sector. So what have been the challenges of the NGOs in tracking or using this data, as they have been engaged in budget tracking for a while now?

Challenges of Budget Tracking Highlighted by participants

Challenges of Budget Tracking Highlighted by participants

“Well, it is important to note that getting the government to release the data took us some time and rigorous advocacy, added to the fact that we ourselves needed training on analysis, and telling stories out of the budget data” explained Joels Terks Abaver of the Christian Association of Non Indigenes. During one of the break out session, access to budget information and training on how to use this budget data became a prominent challenge in the resolution of the several groups.

The second day took participants through the data pipelines, while running an expedition on the available education and health sector budget data that was presented on the first day. Alas! We found out a big challenge on this budget data – it was not location specific! How does one track a budget data that does not answer the question of where? When involved in budget tracking, it is important to have a description data that states where exactly the funds will go. An example is Construction of Borehole water pump in Kaura Namoda LGA Primary School, or we include the budget of Kaura Namoda LGA Primary School as a subtitle in the budget document.

Taking participants through the data pipelines and how it relates to the Monitoring and Evaluation System

Taking participants through the data pipelines and how it relates to the Monitoring and Evaluation System

In communities like this, it is important to note that soft skills are needed to be taught – , like having 80% of the participants not knowing why excel spreadsheets are been used for budget data; like 70% of participants not knowing there is a Google spreadsheet that works like Microsoft Excel; like all participants not even knowing where to get the Nigeria Budget data and not knowing what Open Data means. Well moving through the school of data through the Open Data Party in this part of the world, as changed that notion.”It was an interesting and educative 2-day event taking us through the budget cycle and how budget data relates to tracking” Babangida Ummar, the Chairman of the Budget Working Group said.

Going forward, this group of NGO and journalist has decided to join trusted sources that will be monitoring service delivery of four education institutions in the state, using the Education Budget Tracker. It was an exciting 2-day as we now hope to have a monthly engagement with this working group, as a renewed effort in ensuring service delivery in the education sector. Wondering where the next data party will happen? We are going to the South – South of Nigeria in the month of October – Calabar to be precise, and on the last day of the month, we will be rocking Abuja!

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Dispatch from India: Intro to Data Journalism Workshop in Bangalore http://mk.schoolofdata.org/2014/09/12/dispatch-from-india-intro-to-data-journalism-workshop-in-bangalore/ http://mk.schoolofdata.org/2014/09/12/dispatch-from-india-intro-to-data-journalism-workshop-in-bangalore/#respond Fri, 12 Sep 2014 08:02:33 +0000 http://mk-schoolofdata.scoda.okfn.org/?p=7733 This post is crossposted from DataMeet.org, an organization that promotes open data in India.

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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

Feedback session

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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.

 

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The International Journalism Festival in Perugia (part 2) http://mk.schoolofdata.org/2014/04/28/the-international-journalism-festival-in-perugia-part-2/ http://mk.schoolofdata.org/2014/04/28/the-international-journalism-festival-in-perugia-part-2/#respond Mon, 28 Apr 2014 07:00:26 +0000 http://schoolofdata.okfn.org/?p=6770 The third edition of our School of Data Journalism is happening soon. In our previous post, you met Guido Romeo of Wired Italy and data journalist Elisabetta Tola, two journalists whose work has been impacted by the School of Data Jouranlism. Read on to learn how.


The impact of School of Data Journalism

Having attended the Festival every year since 2006, Tola explained that the School of Data Journalism had added a key ‘hands on’ element to it. While there were a few workshops before 2012, Tola feels that the introduction of School of Data Journalism’s interactive workshops has made it much easier for participants to take up data journalism.

“That’s the big change – before School of Data Journalism I was mainly attending seminars and lectures at the Festival, and the few workshops they had weren’t really hands on. There wasn’t any chance to do practical exercises. Most people were pretty lost when introduced to such topics. The School of Data Journalism workshops were well prepared, with tutorial materials made available before the workshop, making it easier to practice as we followed along,” Tola explained.

Tola continued that getting exposure to some of the free tools available to clean and process data had been very useful in her work. She said that while she had a basic prior knowledge of programs like Excel, at the workshops she learnt how to organise and present data to tell stories.

“I never used Excel with the idea of producing an article out of it. To go from downloading or producing an Excel table, to organising the information in a way that you can extract or produce a story – that’s one of the things I definitely got from these workshops”, she said.

The tools and skills acquired at the School of Data Journalism’s workshops have given both Tola and Romeo the confidence to expand their range of projects. In 2012, they both collaborated on a project called ‘Safe Schools’, the first large scale data driven investigation into seismic safety of Italian public schools, with Italy having one of highest seismic risk in the world.

“Our broader work was to do with communication seismic prevention and safety issues to the public. Most people in Italy are not aware of these things, because there is no culture, though we get major earthquakes quite often. Earthquakes are an important issue in Italy that needs to be understood and presented properly,” Tola explained.

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Romeo points out that the School of Data Journalism’s sessions had made them realise that to take up data journalism it was not necessary to have perfect infrastructure or vast resources, and that it was possible to launch these projects despite the limitations they had working in an ill-equipped newsroom.

“The important thing was showing that you can do high quality data journalism even if you are not in the US or UK with big budgets and developers in your newsrooms, or even efficient FOIA laws, etc. In fact its not only open data that we learn to use, we know how look for that data anywhere. In the earthquake story you can hardly define that data as open data, it was in a very bad condition. But we learnt all the workarounds and the tricks to deal with that,” Romeo said.

Since the launch of the Data Journalism Handbook, Romeo, in collaboration with others, has helped coordinated its translation into Italian. A first draft has been produced, and Romeo is working on the final version with the aim of launching it in the upcoming 2014 International Journalism Festival in Perugia at the end of April. He feels its a valuable resource to introduce students to data journalism.

“Its something I always recommend when I talk to journalism students. Data journalism is something so new in Italy and none of the journalism schools have it in their curriculum – to give them a general idea and the first tools, the Handbook is fantastic,” he explained.

In 2013, at the Festival, Tola also launched a new data journalism website called datajournalism.it. She felt that data journalists in Italy, most of whom are freelancers, needed a platform to display and promote their work.

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“It’s a sort of a lab, a place for journalists to experiment and publish such works. I have many students who have been encouraged and worked on pieces that we published. From that some of their work got published in major news outlets who are hungry for new and innovative things. It’s really working well,” Tola said.

Romeo and Tola are both looking forward to participating in this year’s sessions at the Festival, and would like to see more of these hands on workshops that can broaden their skill sets and range of tools to deal with data.

Romeo concluded, “My only regret with Perugia is that I have done so many panels that I have sometimes missed very useful sessions. With the Festival so successful and an increasing choice of amazing panelists available, this year, I am going to cut down a bit on my own panels and go more as a student, be part of the audience, and learn.”

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