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.

After a successful Data Bootcamp in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania we moved to Accra, Ghana to rinse and repeat. Like Tanzania, Ghana has started an Open Government Data Initiative. They committed to it in 2010 and commissioned the National Information Technology Agency to drive the program. Currently a Open Government Data platform is in the making at data.gov.gh. However, little is to be seen except a mockup.

Compared to Tanzania we found an excited and engaged good mix of journalists, civil society representatives and technologists. While most of the participants were from Ghana, we had one participant coming in from Benin and a Ph.D student from Berkeley researching the Ghana Diaspora – who happened to be in town. We guided around 60 participants through the intensive 3 day program – kicking them off with basic spreadsheet skills and taking them all the way through Google Refine to creating Visualisations with Fusion Tables. This was a long stretch for the journalists and civil society organisers. During the workshop participants formed a total of 7 groups to work on specific stories and applications ranging from traffic accidents to public procurement.

On the third day the participants started teaching themselves: One person created a tutorial on how to import point of interest data into excel while others took the stage to show how to create simple websites and embed Fusion Table graphs and maps.

After three days and two nights of intensive work the Bootcamp ended in short presentations of the projects. The session started with great excitement and provided valuable and critical feedback for all programs. Awarding winners was not an easy task and so the African Media Initative and Worldbank Institute – who funded the prize – decided to ramp up the prize money and distribute it to more projects. A clear winning team focussed on extractive industries and whether the revenue generated helps the communities where the extraction takes place. Two runners-up worked with public procurement data and on a platform to track government manifestos – “It is a contract the government makes with us – the people”. Two project teams were awarded for finding the most interesting stories to take them further: Hospital Coverage and Road Accidents. Both discovered interesting stories in their data and started researching.

The three intensive days left everyone excited and exhausted. Most of the people came into the room knowing one or two other participants and connected with like-minded people of different skills. As a result the HacksHackers chapter in Accra increased it’s participants from 15 to over 90 at the end of the Bootcamp. We’ll keep an eye on further development in Ghana.

I am on the Road in Tanzania and Ghana to spread the datalove. Last week Tanzania’s first data journalism event happened: The Data Bootcamp, organized by the World Bank Institute and the African Media Initiative, brought together international experts, journalists, civil society organizations and technologists to work on data related projects.

In 2010 Tanzania comitted to release open government data as part of the open government partnership. Nevertheless, the Tanzanian government has only released two datasets so far. One goal of the data bootcamp was to spur demand by implementing small data projects. The format was tested before in South Africa, Kenya and Moldovia and helped to raise awareness of Open Data. In preparation and during the workshop 4 more datasets were scraped and liberated. Further data was collected by the participants to work on their specific projects.

Of the 40 participants only 7 were able to code – the majority was journalists and activists who never handled data before. Through the three days they received an intensive training in how to use spreadsheets and tools like Google Refine or Fusion Tables to tell stories with data.

The data bootcamps not only consist of intense hands-on learning experience, they also are a small competition, where 2000$ are awarded to the winner. Since the Tanzania bootcamp did not result in a clear winning project, three finalists were chosen. Each of them received a small starting sum to produce a working prototype within three weeks. After this the winning project will be chosen. Final projects were 1.) A platform tracking promises made by politicians and whether they were fulfilled. 2.) Tracking and monitoring foreign direct investments and 3.) a project illustrating the problem with Land-Grabbing and land ownership in Tanzania.