Starting in August the School of Data Fellow for Indonesia, Yuandra Ismiraldi working together with Publish What You Pay Indonesia organized a weekly / bi-weekly event of knowledge sharing regarding data skills. This knowledge sharing event is free and open for all, so people can just come and learn various skills about working with data.

The skills shared are mainly the detailed and technical version of the data pipeline concept of the School of Data:

• Finding & getting data: Google advanced search, use of data portals, using Tabula to get data from PDFs
• Cleaning data: data cleaning principles, using Open Refine to clean up messy data
• Analyzing data: Excel, Tableau
• Visualizing data: visualization principles, Infogr.am, Piktochart, etc
• And a lot of other data related stuff: spatial data, examples of advocacy using data

The event is more focused on discussions around each topic. The School of Data Fellow first gives a short presentation about the topic and continues with technical hands sessions or with a discussion based on a case study, depending on the topic. With these kinds of knowledge sharing, hopefully that CSOs such as PWYP Indonesia will have a more hands on experience on working with data.

Right now the knowledge sharing has been done about 10 times, with some encouraging results. PWYP Indonesia began to use data more thoroughly as the underlying base for some of their advocacy program and have created some infographics in order to better communicate their data better. Hopefully, knowledge sharing like this can continue and better support CSOs in using data for their advocacy uses.