Data can be a powerful tool for NGOs that can help them improve their daily work. In order to teach these organizations ways to effectively use data, School of Data, Social Tic and colleague from Guatemala’s digital media Plaza Pública hosted a workshop on July 1st in the NGO Festival FITS in Mexico City.

Most of the participants didn’t have previous experience with open data so the idea of the workshop was to show them how to find information online or ask for it to public institutions; teach them simple analysis tools like pivot tables in Excel and give them an introduction to data visualization.

The 25 participants found the workshop interesting and were curious about more data trainings for the future.

Besides helping NGOs, data can be useful for journalism students, data science students, or even curious citizens interested in learning about open data. So we hosted another workshop on July 2^nd in the TAG CDMX a huge event in Mexico City about technology.

School of data and Social Tic had two workshops and Data Expeditions with more than 70 participants across the two sessions. We taught data cleaning with Open Refine, data analysis with Excel and data visualization. All of this with public databases available online.

The experience was really good since we had a really diverse audience that was interested in learning new things. We had positive feedback afterwards of participants that came to ask more questions about trainings and how could they get in touch with School of Data.

A good tip to remember is to have different activities prepared for workshops in big events, since you don’t know for sure what kind of audience is going to attend and you have to be able to adapt the contents.

Mexico City, with its big open data community and its many data-related projects, is an inspiring example for the open data community in Latin America.