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School of Data coming to Ottawa!

- May 22, 2015 in Events

Photo CC-BY, taken by d.neuman. https://flic.kr/p/5DtxaY

Photo CC-BY, taken by d.neuman. https://flic.kr/p/5DtxaY

In a couple of days, the School of Data community will be descending upon Ottawa – first, for our annual Summer Camp, and then to join the International Open Data Conference.

Summer Camp will be the chance for our Class of 2015 fellows to meet the rest of our community, with representation from local instances from all around the world. All in all, with only 30 participants at Summer Camp, we’ll have people from over 20 countries represented! Our new fellows will be learning about School of Data and planning the rest of their fellowships, and representatives from our local instances will be coming together to discuss governance of the School of Data network.

On Thursday and Friday, we’ll be at the Open Data Conference where we’ll have a room for the whole of Thursday. If you’ve had any data-related problems with your projects, any questions or tools you’d like to learn – come and talk to us!

We’ll be running a data clinic on Thursday morning, with people at hand to talk you through any data driven projects you might have or questions you might have, and in the afternoon, we’ll run a short data expedition – a way to get hands on with data. No experience is necessary, and we welcome total newcomers to working with data.

If you don’t have a chance to come and meet us on Thursday at the conference, together with the rest of the Open Knowledge community we’ll be having a meet and greet on Thursday evening at The Brig Pub, 23 York St, from 7.30pm. All welcome – just come by on the night. We’ll be there with fellow Open Knowledge staffers, the School of Data community, and open knowledge advocates from around the world!

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Extended call for Fellowship applicants from Macedonia – apply now!

- April 7, 2015 in Fellowship

NEW: we’re re-opening our call for Fellowship applicants from Macedonia, and now we’re looking for a full time Fellow. Apply now! Deadline April 12th!

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Apply here

Since we closed the call for Fellowship applications, we came to realise that we, and our local partners in Macedonia, Metamorphosis, would most appreciate a slightly differently structured fellowship to the one we’re running in other parts of the world this year.

Namely: we’d love to have a full-time School of Data fellow based in Macedonia, supporting the work of both Metamorphosis, and building and strengthening the data literate community more widely. It seems unfair though to expect the people who already applied for the fellowships as a part-time position to be able to commit full-time to the position, so we’re opening up applications again for people who might be interested in a full time position.

For those who applied already, we’ll be getting in touch to see if you’re also interested in taking on the fellowship as a full time position.

Please share this call widely among fellow data nerds living in Macedonia – we’re looking especially for people with a technical profile, who are interested in using their technical skills for social good. We’ll support the fellow to share their skills with activists, civil society, and journalists, so that they can use data to do their work more effectively.

For more details on what the Fellowship will include, please see below. We look forward to hearing from you!

Apply here

What does the fellowship include?

As a School of Data fellow, you’ll be part of our 9-month programme, which includes the following activities:

  • guided and independent online and offline skillshares and trainings, aimed to develop data and leadership skills,
  • individual mentoring and coaching;
  • an appropriate stipend equivalent to a part time role;
  • Participation in the annual School of Data Summer Camp, which will take place in late May 2015 – location to be confirmed.
  • Participation in activities within a growing community of School of Data practitioners to ensure continuous exchange of resources, knowledge and best practices;
  • Training and coaching of the fellow in participatory event management, storytelling, public speaking, impact assessment etc;
  • Opportunities for paid work – often training opportunities arise in the countries where the fellows are based.
  • Potential work with one or more local civil society organisations to develop data driven campaigns and research.

What did last year’s fellows have to say?

Check out the Testimonials page to see what the 2014 Fellows said about the programme, or watch our Summer Camp video to meet some of the community.

Support

This year’s fellowships will be supported by the Partnership for Open Development (POD) OD4D, Hivos, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Macedonia.

Got questions? See more about the Fellowship Programme here and have a looks at this Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.– or, watch the Ask Us Anything Hangouts that we held in mid-February to take your questions and chat more about the fellowship.

Not sure if you fit the profile? Have a look at our 2013 and 2014 fellows profiles.. Women and other minorities are encouraged to apply.

Convinced? Apply now to become a School of Data fellow in Macedonia. The application will be open until April 12th and the programme will start in late April 2015.

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Fellowship programme update: applications now closed!

- March 11, 2015 in Fellowship

Update, 07/04/2015: We’ve updated our schedule: we’ll be starting the fellowship a week later than planned, on April 20th – and we’ll aim to let everyone know a decision by April 13th, at the very latest. Our apologies for the delay – the great quality and quantity of applications has made choosing just 7 fellows very difficult. Thank you for your patience!

The call for 2015 Fellowships has now closed – thank you all for your applications! We have received many more applications than we had hoped for – in total, we have received 563 fellowships applications from 82 different countries. We’re humbled and grateful that you all took the time to apply, and we wish that we had more places available!

Map of Fellowship applicants

Map of where Fellowship applicants are living

We want to dedicate enough time to read through all of the great applications; because of this, we’ve decided to postpone the start of the Fellowship to give us, and our local partners, enough time to dedicate to reviewing the applications with the time and energy they deserve.

Our new proposed start date for the fellowship is April 13th, and we will let you know of our decision by April 7th. We really hope this doesn’t affect anybody’s plans negatively, or impact their availability for the fellowship – if it does, please drop us an email to info[at]schoolofdata.org and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

We will be updating the Fellowships FAQ with further information and in answer to your questions as they come in – anything else, please email us as above, and keep an eye on the FAQ page.

A huge thank you to all of our partners and the School of Data network who shared the call for Fellows very widely – we really appreciate your help on spreading the word!

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Highlights from the Ask Us Anything hangouts (part I)

- February 17, 2015 in Fellowship

We carried out a couple of video hangouts with 2014 fellows to talk more about last year’s fellowship programme, and about the upcoming programme which has an open Call for Applications, closing on March 10th. For those who prefer reading to watching, here are some highlights and questions that came up during the video hangouts!

Question: What is the typical day of a School of Data fellow?

Happy: As a fellow, I spent a lot of time learning! The Fellowship really helped me to be brave and dive into the data… other than the events you have to do, a lot of it is a learning experience. It really never stops!

Yuandra: Usually, I meet with a lot of people – working with data is very new in my country, Indonesia, so there was lots of interest. I spent lots of time going from organisation to organisation, raising awareness of what they can do with data. Then, planning training – the materials, preparing them, thinking about how to package the materials in a way that people will understand.

Question: What skills are needed to be a School of Data fellow?

Milena: We’re looking for a diversity of skills among the fellows, we’re hoping each fellow will have a strong skill that they’ll be able to teach others, as well as be able to identify gaps in their own knowledge. We only have 7 spaces this year, which is fewer than last year, so it will (hopefully!) be a competitive process.

Codrina: It’s important to have some connections in your region, because the Fellowship (and School of Data) is not just about learning things for yourself, but then to take what you have learned and what you know, and spread it in your own geographical context. Or if you don’t already – be prepared to go around and meet lots of new organisations and build the community around you!

Yuandra: Community building is really important, you’ll be working with other organisations around you who definitely have the need for data. So is communication: my background is very technical, but this Fellowship taught me how to put my technical jargon aside, and explain issues in a simple way for newcomers to the topic.

Question: What kinds of projects did Fellows carry out?

Yuandra: I worked with Publish What You Pay (who work on extractive industries transparency), who previously only used data in Excel, and for reports. When I went there, one of my main points was to show them how they can use data in other ways, for example in visualisations and infographics. They’re still in an early stage of working with data, but they’ve come a long way!

Codrina: I’m a mapping person, so much of the work I did involved either building maps or teaching people how to use them, and how to stay away from usual map problems. I went to Bosnia & Herzegovina, and worked on election maps. If you’re ever curious about the most horrible election system in the world – take a look! We spent a week trying to work out how it works, we ended up asking people to explain the system in a 3 minute video, which worked really well.

Happy: I found that it’s hard to ‘sell’ open data to different CSOs just by explaining – so, I wanted to use my own organisation as a model, to demonstrate what exactly people can do with open data. It was a really good way actually for us to engage with government – you build trust, and partnerships with them, by teaching them what they can do with data. Now, the government are opening up datasets that they’ve never opened before – so this is really exciting for me.

Nisha: We did a data journalism workshop for people who are really not very technologically savvy – it was really rewarding because after a while of working with people who want to know more advanced stuff, you can forget there’s lots of people who still want to know the basics, so you get to open this whole new world to them. We also did a data expedition with an organisation that’s working in the urban space in Hyderabad, with data that they’d collected.

If you like the sound of what last year’s fellows got up to – why not apply yourself and join us as one of the 2015 Fellows? More details are available here, and if you have any further questions please drop us a line on info[at]schoolofdata.org or on @SchoolofData. Applications close on March 10th, and we look forward to hearing from you!

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Ask Us Anything – watch it online now

- February 16, 2015 in Fellowship

To talk through the fellowship programme and hear from last year’s fellows, we held a couple of online hangouts: you can watch them here, and if you have any further questions, feel free to drop us a line on [email protected], or tweet us @SchoolOfData

On Monday 16th February, our 2014 Fellows Codrina, Happy and Yuandra, from Romania, the Philippines, and Indonesia respectively, joined myself and Milena to talk through their experiences in last year’s fellowship.

Here’s the video online (just under an hour long):

And on Tuesday 17th February, Olu and Nisha, from Nigeria and India respectively, joined us to discuss their fellowship. Here’s their video, which is just over 30 minutes long:

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It’s time to get data-savvy: host a School of Data fellow in 2015!

- February 10, 2015 in Fellowship

Applications to host a School of Data fellow in 2015 are now closed! Thank you to everyone who applied – we will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible

We’re looking for local NGOs based in countries classified as low income, lower-middle income or upper-middle income to host our School of Data fellows.

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We have funding for 7 School of Data fellows to take part in our 2015 Fellowship Programme, and from previous experience, we’ve found that the fellowships work best when there is an established local host.

Who are we looking for?

School of Data is promoting data literacy by working with local partners to create impactful data-driven projects. We’re looking organisations that need support in using data more effectively and that are willing to work closely with one of our School of Data fellows over a 9 month period.

If you are selected, you’ll welcome a School of Data fellow in your office on a regular basis, to work on concrete projects and provide you with custom trainings and support, depending on what you need most. You’ll open up your data to the fellow, and allow them to see how you work with data now, help you guide your organisation towards being more data-savvy and using data to strengthen your work, be that in the field of advocacy, campaigning, journalism, or elsewhere within the civil society space. You’ll support the growth of the data-literate community, by inviting those within your network to attend trainings, and organising your own data expeditions, supported closely by the School of Data fellow.

What we expect you to contribute

This programme involves a great deal of resources and commitment from us, and we expect an equal amount of resources and commitment from our partners.

The ideal partner would be able to commit:

  • To support the fellow’s work, objectives and their overall work with your organisation without overburdening them or putting them in difficult situations
  • A good data driven project idea for what you want to achieve together with the fellow. This could be a specific data driven application (a web application, a website, an addition to an existing project or site, a mobile app), broader organisational support to use data, or any other feasible use for open data. The project must hold the potential to engage a large audience, to create a positive change for a community, region or country, and directly promote your organisation goals and objectives.
  • A team to the project. We want to create sustainable projects, and work with you to achieve systemic change within your organisation. We can’t do this with only one person. We would like to work with the relevant team of people in your organisation, depending on your needs and capacity.
  • In addition, we also welcome in kind or financial support for our fellowship programme. Our programme funds the work on the fellow, including a part time equivalent monthly stipend and some travel support but we appreciate additional support that can complement our programme. Get in touch to understand more about the type of support you can provide.

What you’ll get in return

If you are accepted as our local partner, we’ll ask for your assistance in selecting the best applicant to be the School of Data fellow who will work with you. The fellow will support you by:

  • Evaluating your organisational capacity to work with data
  • Delivering custom training and support for your organisation depending on your needs
  • Working with you on a concrete data driven project,

Here is just an example of what our 2014 fellow Hannah Williams worked on together with local partners from South Africa: http://capetownbudgetproject.org.za/

Interested? Get in touch.

Deadline: March 10th

You are also welcome to contact us on [email protected] while you are preparing your application; we’d be happy to answer your questions and help you put together a good application.

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Call for Applications: School of Data 2015 Fellowship programme now open!

- February 10, 2015 in Fellowship

Applications are now closed! – thank you all for your applications, we are now reviewing them together with our partners and will get back to you as soon as possible!

We’re very happy to open today our 2015 Call for School of Data Fellowships!

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Following our successful 2014 School of Data Fellowships, we’re opening today our Call for Applications for the 2015 Fellowship programme. As with last year’s programme, we’re looking to find new data trainers to spread data skills around the world.

As a School of Data fellow, you will receive data and leadership training, as well as coaching to organise events and build your community in your country or region. You will also be part of a growing global network of School of Data practitioners, benefiting from the network effects of sharing resources and knowledge and contributing to our understanding about how best to localise our training efforts.

As a fellow, you’ll be part of a nine-month training programme where you’ll work with us for an average of ten working days a month, including attending online and offline trainings, organising events, and being an active member of the thriving School of Data community.

Get the details

Our 2015 fellowship programme will run from April-December 2015. We’re asking for 10 days a month of your time – consider it to be a part time role, and your time will be remunerated. To apply, you need to be living in a country classified as lower income, lower-middle income or upper-middle income categories as classified here.

Who are we looking for?

People who fit the following profile:

  • Data savvy: has experience working with data and a passion for teaching data skills.
  • Social change: understands and interested in the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the media in bringing positive change through advocacy, campaigns, and storytelling.
  • Has some facilitation skills and enjoys community-building (both online and offline) – or, eager to learn and develop their communication and presentation skills
  • Eager to learn from and be connected with an international community of data enthusiasts
  • Language: a strong knowledge of English – this is necessary in order to communicate with other fellows, to take part in the English-run online skillshares and the offline Summer Camp

To give you an idea of who we’re looking for, check out the profiles of our 2014 fellows – we welcome people from a diverse range of backgrounds, too, so people with new skillsets and ranges of experience are encouraged to apply.

This year, we’d love to work with people with a particular topical focus, especially those interest in working with extractive industries data, financial data, or aid data.

There are 7 fellowship positions open for the April to December 2015 School of Data training programme.

Geographical focus

We’re looking for people based in low-, lower-middle, and upper-middle income countries as classified by the World Bank, and we have funding for Fellows in the following geographic regions:

  • One fellow from Macedonia
  • One fellow from Central America – focus countries Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, but we welcome applications from all Central American countries.
  • One fellow from South America – focus countries Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and again, applications are really welcome from all South American countries.
  • Two fellows based in African countries (ie. two different countries)
  • Two fellows based in Asian countries (ie. two different countries)

What does the fellowship include?

As a School of Data fellow, you’ll be part of our 9-month programme, which includes the following activities:

  • guided and independent online and offline skillshares and trainings, aimed to develop data and leadership skills,
  • individual mentoring and coaching;
  • an appropriate stipend equivalent to a part time role;
  • Participation in the annual School of Data Summer Camp, which will take place in May 2015 – location to be confirmed.
  • Participation in activities within a growing community of School of Data practitioners to ensure continuous exchange of resources, knowledge and best practices;
  • Training and coaching of the fellow in participatory event management, storytelling, public speaking, impact assessment etc;
  • Opportunities for paid work – often training opportunities arise in the countries where the fellows are based.
  • Potential work with one or more local civil society organisations to develop data driven campaigns and research.

What did last year’s fellows have to say?

Check out the Testimonials page to see what the 2014 Fellows said about the programme, or watch our Summer Camp video to meet some of the community.

Support

This year’s fellowships will be supported by the Partnership for Open Development (POD) OD4D, Hivos, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Macedonia. We welcome more donors to contribute to this year’s fellowship programme! If you are a donor and are interested in this, please email us at [email protected].

Got questions? See more about the Fellowship Programme here and have a looks at this Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.– or, watch the Ask Us Anything Hangouts that we held in mid-February to take your questions and chat more about the fellowship.

Not sure if you fit the profile? Have a look at our 2013 and 2014 fellows profiles.. Women and other minorities are encouraged to apply.

Convinced? Apply now to become a School of data fellow. The application will be open until March 10th and the programme will start in April 2015.

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Data literacy needs within the Follow the Money network

- January 26, 2015 in Events

Last week, I joined a meeting hosted by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative around ‘Follow the Money’. It brought together people working on various aspects of the money trail, from access to information, to developers, investigative journalists, campaigners and activists, to think about how we can better collaborate in the future, and where the gaps are in the network.

Data Pipeline

I had the pleasure of running a couple of School of Data related sessions, too – one short skillshare running through the ‘data pipeline’, and a longer session building out a ‘follow the money’ focused data pipeline, focused mainly on gathering various data sources on topics in this field. The pipeline, in its rough format, is online here, and I’ll publish it in a more accessible format on the School of Data site soon too.

The value of asking questions

These sessions made me think about how data literacy skills could be developed within this community, and what is really needed to support and further the work of Follow the Money initiatives. Pragmatically speaking, for technology and data to be engaged and used successfully to further people’s work, not everyone in that room needs to be a superstar data wrangler or developer. What they do need, though, is to know where the people with technical expertise are, and to be able to ask them for assistance.

In the ‘thanks’ at the end of the workshop, lots of us mentioned that being in a space where, as our facilitator Allen Gunn said, ‘asking a question is considered to be a heroic act of leadership’ rather than a signal of a lack of knowledge. It was obvious that we valued most the patience and understanding of those around us who have higher levels of knowledge in a certain field, be that topical expertise, or technical; and that for many, the opportunity to ask these technical questions comes far too rarely.

This made me think about the value of the School of Data community – in my follow up emails from the workshop, I’ve been connecting people from various countries and contexts to former fellows who are based near them, or people running local groups in neighbouring countries, who can help them in person as well as online with their data-related queries. From past experience of seeing how well our data trainers and community members work with civil society groups with lower levels of data literacy, I’m optimistic that this will work out well – whether it be simply exchanging a few emails, or working with the community members or us at School of Data central to commission actual in person trainings.

Data wrangling + topical expertise = effective data-driven campaigning

As I mentioned, these connections provide a somewhat pragmatic solution to a need for better use of data among the community. Ideally, however, we would have people based within these organisations for long term support, who have both topical expertise and data wrangling skills.

And from what I heard, the need for this skillset will become extremely pronounced in the coming years; various directives and new laws regarding data availability and transparency sitting at different points of the money trail will be coming into force over the next couple of years, and they will bring with them a deluge of data. For example, data on extractives following Section 1504 of the Dodd Frank Reform, and company data following the EU Accounting and Transparency directives. What stories lie within that data, and how can we uncover them?

Many of the people and organisations represented at the Follow the Money workshop have been instrumental in campaigning for those transparency directives; but how many of those organisations possess in-house ability to actually process and use that data? Effectively, the next round of campaigning should be based on stories that come out of that hard-fought for data – but for that to happen, we need to start preparing now, by building data and technical skills among our communities.

Laying the groundwork for data storytelling

So, how can we start doing this? It could be through providing support for current employees of organisations to attend data expeditions or data skills courses on an ongoing basis; not just one off workshops, but people learning skills that are clearly relevant to their work, and having regular refresher courses to keep it relevant and in their minds. Or, (apologies for the blatant self-promotion here!) – it could be through supporting topical School of Data fellows to be based within the community and provide ongoing support, focusing on a specific topic – like extractives, or corporate money flows, for example.

Our experiences from the 2014 fellowships have led us to believe that the fellowship scheme is a sustainable and successful method of building up capacity both in terms of finding and supporting data storytellers and trainers (the Fellows), and equipping them with the skills they need to provide ongoing support to organisations based in their area, with whom they share their skills. Last year, the fellows carried out activities ranging from regular workshops with local organisations, to data clinics and expeditions for newcomers to get hands on with data, to simply being present within organisations as in-house support.

From what I saw last week, a lot of organisations within the Follow the Money network could do with this support. The earlier we start developing this capacity, the better equipped we will be as a community to start delving into the avalanche of data that is soon to come our way.

If you want to find out more about the Fellowship scheme, see the section ‘Fellowship Programme’ on our 2014 Annual Report, and if you’d like to talk about supporting a fellow through our upcoming 2015 scheme, get in touch with me on zara.rahman [at] okfn.org

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School of Data in 2014: Annual Report

- January 14, 2015 in Uncategorized

We’re very happy to share with you today our 2014 Report, which you can see online here: http://2014.schoolofdata.org.

It includes a run through of our major activities from 2014: our very first Summer Camp, held in Berlin in July 2014; the 2014 fellowship scheme, which saw 12 data training leaders from across the world join us as our Class of 2014 School of Data fellows; highlights from their fellowship and activities carried out; our work supporting advocacy organisations directly; and the progress made on our online and offline training materials, to name just a few highlights.

It was inspiring to see how much our community got done during the last year – and sadly impossible to include everything that happened in the report, but hopefully this gives a good taster.

About School of Data

School of Data’s mission is to empower the citizens and organisations who wish to use data ‘for good’, with the skills they need. We work with civil society organisations and journalists, teaching them to use data to find evidence, create compelling visualisations and tell stories to present their arguments in a more effective way.

We believe in “learning by doing” and using fun, hands on methods to engage in data storytelling. Together with our global community, we have developed online training materials in multiple languages, and carried out offline trainings in partnership with local organisation in more than 30 countries worldwide, as well as provided support and advice to organisations wanting to become more data-driven.

Contact

If you are interested in supporting the upcoming 2015 Fellowship scheme, or knowing more about the Fellows (both current and future) – get in touch with Zara Rahman on zara.rahman[at]okfn.org.

If you would like to know more about other School of Data activities, including trainings and events, collaboration opportunities and organisational support please email Programme Director Milena Marin on milena.marin[at]okfn.org

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School of Data fellows: what are they up to?

- November 26, 2014 in Fellowship

It’s been a little while since we’ve had news on what all of the 2014 School of Data fellows are up to as part of their fellowship – so, we wanted to give you some quick updates on what’s been going on in just the last week or so from a few of the fellows:

  • Hannah, in South Africa, is helping Ndifuna Ukwazi create a map of Cape Town’s Budget, and testing out CartoDB.

  • Siyabonga, also in South Africa, organised and hosted a data scraping workshop together with Tabula and import.io last week, and is coding a news app at the moment. Watch this space! Siya is also holding a skillshare on Thursday 27 Nov on User Experience for all things data- join the hangout here. The skillshare will take place at 1pm GMT/8am CST/9am EDT/6pm IST/8pm WIB.

  • Dona, together with Milena, is doing a training later this week in Macedonia, covering mainly spreadsheets and visualisations. Today, they’re talking at an OGP forum on “Open Data as an opportunity for CSOs and businesses.”

  • Last week Antonio and Ruben were in San Jose, Costa Rica, where they hosted a data expedition at the Open Government Partnership Americas Summit– you can see the projects that were created on the HackDash board, and more updates coming soon! This week Antonio is organising a meetup together with HacksHackers Lima, and Juan Manuel from Escuela de Datos and SocialTIC, will be joining him there!

  • In Hungary, Rita is giving a presentation at a business intelligence conference today, and ran a regular beginner Python workshop last Sunday. Next week, she’ll be doing two reloaded spreadsheet workshops.

  • Yuandra is working with Publish What You Pay Indonesia on building infographics, and on Friday will be talking in a community event regarding the use of open data in Bandung. He also took part in a national conference for CSOs on democracy, joining a panel to discuss data use in the fight for democracy.

  • This week in the Philippines, Happy and Sam Leon have been training the Civil Service Commission – it sounds like they are all having a wonderful time, and Happy will be writing more about this very soon!

  • Over in Romania, Codrina carried out the second workshop for the School of ACtivism, and did a presentation on open data at an OpenStreetMap conference in Brașov.

  • In Tanzania, Joachim has been have following up with Tanzanian educational agencies suchas Ministry of Education and Vocational Training(MOEVT) and
    President’s Office, Public Service Management(PO-PSM) to revise and build on materials learned from the Education Data Dive workshop held in October. This week on Friday , he’ll meet up again with PO-PSM to dive deep into Open Refine and QGIS.


Wow. We’re super impressed with all the great work that the fellows are doing – we hope you are, too!

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