The latest from what we are up to at the School of Data.

School of Data goes Spanish

Next month, a couple of the team will be headed over to Latin America for a series of warm-up events for the launch of the Spanish version of School of Data. The School will be launched at the AbreLatam conference in Uruguay.

On their way to Uruguay, they will be passing through Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Know an organisation or amazing individual doing great things with data they should meet up with on the way? Please drop us a line on schoolofdata [at] okfn.org.

Thank you to the amazing organisations and individuals who are helping to make this happen, including Social-TIC (Mexico), DATA (Uruguay), the Knight Media Fellows and the Hacks/Hackers network.

Data Clinics

Over at, OpenSpending, Anders Pedersen is running bi-weekly data clinics to help people troubleshoot their spending data, from getting better data, to cleaning, analysing and visualising the data.

The next clinic will happen on Wednesday 19th June in the evening.

Have data you want to bring along to troubleshoot? Join the OpenSpending mailing list, or email info [at] openspending.org for more details on the upcoming clinics.

Data Expeditions

Mapping the Garment Factories

Some participants of the Mapping the Garments Factories expedition couldn’t get enough and carried on their expedition into the week. A few participants have written a writeup of their expedition, concluding:

“major retailers like Wal-Mart maintains high levels of opacity around their supply chain and audit standards, which are detrimental to improving working standards in the garment industry.”

Tax Avoidance

Our tax avoidance teams pair up. We’ve paired up techies and storytellers to tackle the challenge of finding tax avoiders and evaders. Welcome also to our first Spanish-speaking group, who will take on the challenge. The expedition launches tomorrow, we will keep you posted with updates!

Call for ideas for topics

Have an idea for a topic you think would make a great expedition? (Or, even better – keen to help us lead one?) Please drop us a line on schoolofdata [at] okfn.org.

From the Blog

• John Murtagh’s Fantastic Data Roundup
• Data Diva, Michael Bauer has been on the road, training, training, training in Prague, Barcelona and Accra.
• Analysing UK Lobbying Data Using OpenRefine by Tony Hirst.