Increasing Youth Involvement in the Data Revolution

There is a lively online discussion happening right now on Wikiprogress about “Making data more accessible for society at large”. This blog, by Wikichild Coordinator Melinda Deleuze, will discuss how children and youth could become more involved in the open data world as data users, storytellers and producers. 

A result of an open data society is that data will inevitably become more freely available for young people to download, use, and share. This means that we need to train children and youth to become more data savvy, so they can interpret the increasing amounts of raw data and visualisations. There are already several free courses and tutorials available online about how to analyse data (e.g. Visualisingdata.com; Lynda.com; Coursera.org), which could prove useful for older youth and teachers. There are also online learning tools geared towards a younger audience, such as these data handling games for children as young at 5 years old. Another great initiative mentioned on the online discussion by Big Idea is their Joint Consultation Workshop in Tanzania back in March. The workshop trained young people from Ghana, Nepal and Tanzania to analyse data and present it to a younger audience, which brings me to my next point...

 

If data is going to be more easily understandable for youth, then it should be other young people telling the stories. The European Youth Press (EYP) has begun training young journalists to use more data in their work. In 2013, EYP launched the “FlagIt!” project which trained 48 young journalists from 4 continents on how to use digital visualisation tools in open source. The project will soon publish an online handbook available to anyone who would like to use these tools. This September, EYP will be hosting a conference for young European journalists (18 to 26 years old) on data-driven journalism, which will also include participation in the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium on media in the era of big data. Finally, EYP provides a free online course “Doing Journalism with Data,” open to anyone with an internet connection. 

Finally, more interactive technology tools should be geared towards youth as data producers, so that their voices can be heard. The Global Partnership on Youth in the Post-2015 Development Agenda (#GPY2015) is working on an interactive crowdsourcing initiative to identify youth priorities, building on the results of young voters in the MyWorld2015 survey: Education; Employment and Entrepreneurship; Health; Good Governance; Peace and Stability. Citizen Science for Youth’s webinar last October is another example of an initiative aimed at engaging youth in crowdsourcing data. 

Do you know of other initiatives that include child and youth in the data revolution? Feel free to leave a comment in the online discussion!

Melinda Deleuze

Democratising data: the need to make statistics more accessible to everyone

The world of statistics is changing: traditionally the domain of experts alone, new technologies and methods of communication have the potential to open up a range of different data to new audiences, and to make statistics more accessible to everyone. From 11-24 June, Wikiprogress is hosting an online discussion on the role of open data, communication and technology in making data more accessible for society at large. This blog, by Kate Scrivens, Wikiprogress Project Manager, sets out some of the key issues for the discussion.

Data of the people, by the people and for the people…

For centuries, the primary purpose of government data, from the Domesday Book to the present day, has been to inform decision-making at the very highest levels. However, the last decade or so has seen an increasing movement towards ‘democratising data’, and making statistics available that are more relevant to a broader public. The shift towards a ‘beyond GDP’ mind-set, focusing on developing better and broader measures of people’s well-being, is an essential step in developing statistics that are more relevant to people’s lives. But democratising data is also about ensuring that relevant statistics are more easily accessible to a wider public.

Thanks to the internet and other innovative technologies, people can engage with data in an increasing number of ways: not only as consumers of new types of information, but also as interpreters, communicators and even producers of data.

People as data interpreters: the power of Open Data

Open data are data that people are ‘free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction’, according to the Open Knowledge Foundation.  By opening up previously restricted data – from government and other sources – for universal use, citizens have the chance to be much more directly involved in decision-making, and to be better informed about issues that affect their own well-being. For example, people looking to move to a new town, can compare data on air quality, schools, hospitals, or other factors that matter most to them in order to select the best place to live. They can also use the same data to shine a spotlight on areas where improvement is needed, thereby strengthening the accountability of government and other institutions.

Opening up access to data can be empowering, but not everyone has the necessary skills or patience to make the most of raw data. Open Data has the biggest impact when they are made available in an easily accessible format by people acting as ‘data interpreters’, with the necessary analytical and technical skills to re-use the data in innovative, new ways, such as creating mobile apps and other technologies. For example, publicdata.eu, showcases a large selection of apps created using European public data, from an app to monitor carbon monoxide emissions across Europe, to one helping road users identify traffic accident hotspots. For the power of Open Data to be evenly shared across society, however, capacity-building is crucial. Organisations such as the School of Data, exist for exactly this purpose: to provide engaged citizens with the skills they need to make the most of data. For many, this kind of power shift is the true meaning of the “data revolution” (read more here and here).

People as data communicators: visualisation and storytelling

Creating mobile apps is just one way of re-using data. An equally powerful way of making statistics more accessible to a broader audience is through the use of storytelling to convey the underlying meaning of the data. This can be done by the data producers themselves (such as government or statistical agencies) or by intermediaries such as data journalists, civil society organisations or anyone with an interest in finding the best way to communicate the key messages of datasets. Stories can be told in the traditional way, through narrative text, or they can be conveyed in a more visual manner - through infographics and charts that organise the data in such a way that the meaning is immediately apparent. Data visualisations can be incredibly beautiful, but their importance goes beyond aesthetics: they provide a unique means of highlighting new patterns in statistics and looking at the world in a different way. Visualisations can be static, or they can be interactive and dynamic, such as the animated trends from Gapminder.org, which visualise the evolution in development indicators such as child mortality and HIV prevalence to gain new insight.

Telling a story around statistics, either through words or visualisations, is not without its pitfalls and data communicators need to be responsible storytellers, not misrepresenting the data to meet their own needs.  Data visualisation as a mass communication tool is a relatively new discipline and a better understanding of best practice and good examples would be a helpful resource for data communicators.

People as data producers: crowdsourcing statistics through digital technology

Finally, digital technologies mean that members of the public can have greater access to statistics by participating themselves as data producers. The prevalence of accessible yet sophisticated mapping technology through mobile platforms provides a means to crowdsource data from members of the public. While this is a new area, there are a number of examples of crowdsourced data related to progress and well-being statistics such as Mappiness - an app to monitor levels of subjective well-being in the UK, Open Elm Map – which uses community-generated data to track Dutch Elm Disease, Harrassmap – which uses crowdsourced data to highlight sexual harassment hotspots in Egypt, and the Ushadi platform, which was originally used to track political violence in Kenya and which now encompasses a number of open-source platforms. Crowdsourced data is perhaps the ultimate in democratising data: empowering people to be producers as well as consumers of data.

Best practices and good examples

It is clear that making data more accessible to society at large covers a broad range of issues. Technological advances provide a huge potential for democratising data, but many of these areas are new or evolving quickly. There is a need to identify best practices and good examples in the areas of Open Data, visualisation, and crowdsourcing technologies in order to provide guidance to those interested in making data more accessible.

This online discussion is an opportunity for the Wikiprogress community to hear from individuals and organisations with experience in these areas. In particular we’d like answers to the following questions:

• What role can Open Data play to increase citizen’s engagement with well-being and progress statistics?

• How can data visualisation and storytelling be used to increase our understanding of data? What are the best examples of data visualisation?

• What are the best examples of crowd-sourced data related to well-being and progress?

We look forward to hearing from you in the discussion!

11 ways to rethink open data and make it relevant to the public

This blog is by ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow Miguel Paz a Chilean journalist and founder and CEO of Poderopedia, a data journalism website that highlights links among Chile’s business and political elites. This post is part of the Wikiprogress series on Data and Statistics in the lead up to Open Data Day on 22 February. 

It’s time to transform open data from a trendy concept among policy wonks and news nerds into something tangible to everyday life for citizens, businesses and grassroots organisations. Here are some ideas to help us get there:

1. Improve access to data

Craig Hammer from the World Bank has tackled this issue, stating that “Open Data could be the game changer when it comes to eradicating global poverty”, but only if governments make available online data that become actionable intelligence: a launch pad for investigation, analysis, triangulation, and improved decision making at all levels.

2. Create open data for the end user

As Hammer wrote in a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, while the "opening" has generated excitement from development experts, donors, several government champions, and the increasingly mighty geek community, the hard reality is that much of the public has been left behind, or tacked on as an afterthought. Let`s get out of the building and start working for the end user.

3. Show, don't tell

Regular folks don't know what “open data” means. Actually, they probably don't care what we call it and don't know if they need it. Apple’s Steve Jobs said that a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. We need to stop telling them they need it and start showing them why they need it, through actionable user experience.

4. Make it relevant to people’s daily lives, not just to NGOs and policymakers’ priorities

A study of the use of open data and transparency in Chile showed the top 10 uses were for things that affect their lives directly for better or for worse: data on government subsidies and support, legal certificates, information services, paperwork. If the data doesn't speak to priorities at the household or individual level, we've lost the value of both the “opening” of data, and the data itself.

5. Invite the public into the sandbox

We need to give people “better tools to not only consume, but to create and manipulate data,” says my colleague Alvaro Graves, Poderopedia’s semantic web developer and researcher. This is what Code for America does, and it’s also what happened with the advent of Web 2.0, when the availability of better tools, such as blogging platforms, helped people create and share content.

6. Realise that open data are like QR codes

Everyone talks about open data the way they used to talk about QR codes--as something ground breaking. But as with QR Codes, open data only succeeds with the proper context to satisfy the needs of citizens. Context is the most important thing to funnel use and success of open data as a tool for global change.

7. Make open data sexy and pop, like Jess3.com Geeks became popular because they made useful and cool things that could be embraced by end users. Open data geeks need to stick with that program.

8. Help journalists embrace open data

Jorge Lanata, a famous Argentinian journalist who is now being targeted by the Cristina Fernández administration due to his unfolding of government corruption scandals, once said that 50 percent of the success of a story or newspaper is assured if journalists like it.

That’s true of open data as well. If journalists understand its value for the public interest and learn how to use it, so will the public. And if they do, the winds of change will blow. Governments and the private sector will be forced to provide better, more up-to-date and standardised data. Open data will be understood not as a concept but as a public information source as relevant as any other. We need to teach Latin American journalists to be part of this.

9. News nerds can help you put your open data to good use

In order to boost the use of open data by journalists we need news nerds, who can teach colleagues how open data through brings us high-impact storytelling that can change public policies and hold authorities accountable.

News nerds can also help us with “institutionalizing data literacy across societies” as Hammer puts it. ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow and digital strategist Justin Arenstein calls these folks "mass mobilizers" of information. Alex Howard “points to these groups because they can help demystify data, to make it understandable by populations and not just statisticians.”

I call them News Ninja Nerds, accelerator task forces that can foster innovations in news, data and transparency in a speedy way, saving governments and organizations time and a lot of money. Projects like ProPublica’s Dollars For Docs are great examples of what can be achieved if you mix FOIA, open data and the will to provide news in the public interest.

10. Rename open data

Part of the reasons people don't embrace concepts such as open data is because it is part of a lingo that has nothing to do with them. No empathy involved. Let's start talking about people's right to know and use the data generated by governments. As Tim O'Reilly puts it: "Government as a Platform for Greatness," with examples we can relate to, instead of dead .PDF's and dirty databases.

11. Don't expect open data to substitute for thinking or reporting

Investigative Reporting can benefit from it. But “but there is no substitute for the kind of street-level digging, personal interviews, and detective work” great journalism projects entailed, says David Kaplan in a great post entitled, Why Open Data is Not Enough. 

“The increasing access to data creates, more than ever, a need to make sense of disparate pieces of information,” said Paul Radu, executive director of the Sarajevo-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. “It is the mix of local and global information, the combination of local shoe-leather reporting and leaps across borders through databases, that will make the difference on the long run.”

As Matt Waite, Politifact creator and Drone Journalism Lab director, notes, robots cannot replace humans complexity. They can’t think like we do.

Welcome to the debate.

The post originally appeared on the The International Journalists’ Network’s site, IJNet.org. IJNet helps professional, citizen and aspiring journalists find training, improve their skills and make connections. IJNet is produced by the International Center for Journalists in seven languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish — with a global team of professional editors. Subscribe to IJNet’s free, weekly newsletter. You can also follow IJNet on Twitter or like IJNet on Facebook.

Global media innovation content related to the projects and partners of the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellows on IJNet is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and edited by Jennifer Dorroh.

Online Discussion: Data Gaps on Gender Equality

Wikigender is running a new online discussion in partnership with the UN Foundation, Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC), the EU-LAC Foundation, European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), ECLAC and PARIS21 – while collaborating with Wikiprogress and Wikichild regarding:

Data Gaps on Gender Equality

Open from 27 January-14 February

We would like to engage participants in a discussion about where the data gaps exist concerning gender equality. With this discussion, we hope to pioneer initiatives that generate new data and new methodological approaches and to examine complex areas of gender equality, including unpaid care, time use and social norms. The discussion will also address the “data revolution” and gender statistics, lessons learned since the adoption of the MDGs in 2000, and proposals for priority targets for the post-2015 development agenda.

Each week of the discussion, there will be a different theme open for comments and dialogue:

Week 1: The socio-economic empowerment of women

Week 2: Violence against women

Week 3: Civic and political participation of women

The outcomes and main findings of the discussion will be summarised in a final report and presented at a side event at the 58^th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women held in New York in March 2014. The side event will be organised by the OECD Development Centre, Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

We invite you to find out more about the online discussion and questions for each theme by clicking here: http://bit.ly/1dnPEkI

You may begin participating in the discussion on 27 January, 2014. To post a comment, simply go to the “Contribute!” section of the discussion page. We count on your participation and hope that you will disseminate this information widely to your contacts! Feel free to use the following links to send an invitation to your contacts in Spanish or French also. On Twitter, we use the hashtags #gender and #datagaps

See you very soon on www.wikigender.org to discuss this issue!

Estelle Loiseau

Wikigender Co-ordinator

The Road to 2015 is Paved with Open Data

This blog, by David Hall-Matthews, managing director at Publish What You Fund is about the data revolution, specifically concerning aid transparency. This is the 17th post in ODI's blog series on ‘What kind of ‘data revolution’ do we need for post-2015?’ This post is also a part of the Wikiprogress series on Data and Statistics and Post-2015. 

Transparency is a key pillar of sustainable development: an essential piece of the puzzle to enable effectiveness, accountability and social change. And in recent years, information on aid spending has slowly become more available and open.
 

The basic principle that aid information should be publicly available is now accepted as an essential component of international development. Nowhere has that been seen more prominently than the discussions around the post-2015 Development Goals.

We have two years to create new goals. Too often, in development, looming deadlines induce resignation and recrimination – but there are still reasons to be optimistic for the future of aid transparency and open data within the post-2015 process.

Credit is due to the High Level Panel for their boldness and dynamism. Their call for a “data revolution” set the tone for debates on a range of issues, and quickly became one of the buzz phrases of 2013.

There is no question that the “data revolution” means open data. Making detailed information available to everyone, even on something as well-established as aid, would be genuinely radical.

But buzz phrases can mean different things to different people. Many commentators have focused on inequalities of access to information. While it is of course essential to highlight obstacles to data use by the poorest, it would be foolish to put the cart before the horse. Before anyone can use data, there must be data out there.

Others have pointed out that the data revolution can’t be imposed from above. I agree – but we shouldn’t let an insistence on bottom-up approaches let those at the top off the hook on their own transparency commitments. Changes at the top can make a difference.

Aid may not be the most important resource flow after 2015, but making it transparent can make a significant difference to the problematic top-down relationships between donor and recipient nations – and it can set an example for other flows, because aid transparency has had a head-start.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is the only existing international open data standard now in use. Knowing how difficult it is to make new agreements – let alone implement common standards – that’s a massive achievement. Any serious attempt to start a data revolution in 2015 would be crazy to overlook a system that works.

IATI works because:
It’s relatively easy to publish to it. Organisations only need to convert information they hold into a common format, then send links to an online registry.
It’s relatively easy to use the data. It’s raw, and will need to be interpreted to make sense to everyone (like all information), but it’s fully accessible and – critically – comparable.
It’s relatively easy to adopt the standard. Many non-traditional providers of development finance, including NGOs, climate finance providers, philanthropic foundations, development finance institutions and private companies have published to IATI.

IATI itself will be too limited to encompass all resource and information flows. But new standards – for example on domestic budget transparency, or extractive industry payments, could adopt the template – and common code – to make it as easy as possible for users to compare, contrast and collate.

There is increasingly more data out there – now we must make it a useful weapon in the fight to end poverty. We are working hard to ensure donors are becoming more open and now we are working hard to ensure information will be put to use.

We know that raw data may not be understood by the average person on the street, but don’t be fooled into thinking that only small packages of neatly visualised information can be understood. That’s an excuse used too easily by those seeking to control what data is released.

IATI was built specifically in response to partner country, civil society and government requests for more detailed, useful information on money coming into their countries. All donors should publish to IATI if they want to truly bolster the bottom-up approach to international development. It doesn’t make sense for donors to be suggesting new goals and ways to hold partner countries to account, without doing their own bit first.

The end of 2015 is not only the deadline to agree new Development Goals. It is also the date by when the Busan Partnership Agreement needs to be implemented.

Our Aid Transparency Index, the industry standard for assessing transparency among the world’s major donors, shows that most donors have quite a way to go to meeting their Busan commitments. The average score for all 67 organisations was disappointingly low, despite the many international commitments and speeches about openness.

For example, France is the third largest donor in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), spending over USD 1 billion in 2011. But we could find no comprehensive listing of the country’s current aid activities for DRC – or for any other recipient country. Similarly, Japan is the second largest donor in DRC, spending over USD 1.2 billion in 2011. But their database does not include basic information on the projects it’s funding, such as start or end dates of projects or their current status.

In other words, over USD 2 billion in aid to DRC – an aid dependent and fragile state –remains unmonitored. And much of the information we could get was out of date, patchy and difficult to compare with that of other funders operating in DRC.

It’s not all bad though. A leading group of organisations is publishing large amounts of useful information on their current aid activities. And some donors have made real progress over the past year. So there is reason to hope for better aid transparency by 2015.

Open data and transparency are becoming fashionable watch words, but we’re checking if donors are really delivering, looking beyond high-level commitments and long-held reputations. Crucially, we are measuring donors’ progress on the road to 2015.

- David Hall-Matthews

This post first appeared January 16, 2014 on ODI's Post2015.org site.

Open Data for Africa, Youth Participation and Assessing Progress towards the MDGs

This blog, written by Ousmane Aly Diallo, is  part of the Wikiprogress focus on its Africa Network*.

 “African societies, like any other societies indeed, have to measure progress. But more importantly they have to define what is meant by progress. They have to hold a dialogue in a way that has not been done before.” - Pali Lehohla (Director General of Statistics South Africa).

Welcome to this week’s review of progress initiatives, articles and reports that focus on Africa. Here are the highlights from this week:

• The Global Humanitarian Assistance Report has been released. This year's report focuses on how international assistance has responded to humanitarian crisis, with sections on funding, recent emergencies and quick response to humanitarian crisis. The report sheds light on the growing role of non-traditional donors, the increasing levels of unmet humanitarian needs, as well as the importance of transparency and access to reliable information. 

• Abuja+12: Shaping the future of health in Africa. African Heads of Governments and States pledged during the AU Abuja Summit to eliminate pandemics, such as HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, in Africa by 2030, as well as improve their national health systems and strengthen their pharmaceutical capacities. This summit helped to renew the commitments made during the Millennium Summit and the Abuja Summit in 2001.

• The Millennium Development Goals Report 2013 by UNDP, looks at the areas where action is needed most (i.a. hunger; maternal health; sanitation and environmental protection). This report also shows that the achievement of the MDGs has been uneven among and within countries.

• The Open Data for Africa initiative, hosted by AfDB, is now available for all 54 African countries. It is part of AfDB’s “Africa Information Highway” initiative, aiming to improve data collection, management, and dissemination in Africa. It will allow open access to the necessary data in order to manage and monitor development results in African countries, including tracking progress on the MDGs. (See video below.)

• The Economist devoted a special report on the Arab Spring, two years after its inception. The author Max Roedenbeck argues that the aspirations behind the movement are yet to be met and he proceeds to review what has been achieved so far. Duncan Green of Oxfam reviews the report and highlights its main points in this post.

• Malala Yousafzai spoke at the United Nations General Assembly this 12 July in defense of education for all, particularly for young girls. This blog, outlines three necessary steps to increase youth participation: listening, increasing involvement in decision-making as well as involvement in the implementation process.

We hope you enjoyed the week-in-review. Stay tuned the same time next week for another riveting read on the week that was.

 Yours in progress,

Ousmane Aly Diallo

* Wikiprogress Africa Network aims, to provide a platform for knowledge sharing on measuring progress in an Africa context.