As summer holidays are over, we are also back with the latest news from around the network.

New team members

Welcome to Milena and Neil who joined the School of Data project in this last month. Milena’s mission is to bring School of Data network to the rest of the world by supporting our community mentors and other local partners, organising events & workshops, etc. Neil joined us as writer and analyst and he is on a quest to improve project documentation and to bring the Open Knowledge Foundation work to a wider audience.

Community mentors training

We kicked off our training for community mentors with a data expedition in which we explored the links between NSA employees and companies. Check out this blog post for more details.

If you want to become a community mentor, sign up here!

OKCon coming up

The OKCon is coming up next week! We have an amazing track on “Evidence and Stories” where we’ll examine the role of open data in evidence-based policy making, data-driven campaigns and advocacy, data journalism and visualisation.

We are also running a ScoDa workshop where we plan to teach people from our community how to run their own data expedition. Check out the details and sign up to attend here.

Interested in the whole conference? Check out the full schedule here.

Get involved

Keen to contribute to our blog? Help us write our weekly data roundup! See an example roundup post: http://bit.ly/14e3Mpv

Our usual regular contributor and hero, Anna Leach is looking for some dedicated writers to rotate with once a month. If you are interested, drop us an email at [email protected].

Ask.Schoolofdata.org

A big thanks to our regular contributors, especially Chris Spruck, Paul Antoine Chevalier and Sam Leach for providing useful answers this month!

Here is a selection of some great questions getting asked in the forum – can you help?

• No Answer! cartogram.js distortion on map
• No Answer! cartodb: cannot import csv with geojson column working with cartodb
• No answer! Pandas for Python without Internet (new question)
• Tools to extract data from a graphic ?
• What is the best tutorial to learn D3js ?
• most simple way to publish geo data information in a dataset

From the Blog

• Some lessons on how to organise a crash course in data journalism from Internews friends
• Eliot’s Higgins post about tracking weapons is Syria using social media
• Michael’s mini series on exploring IATI data:
• Part 1: Getting the data
• Part 2: Cleaning & Visualising
• Tarek’s post about validating election data in Egypt

See you soon with more from School of Data!

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