Workshop: Visualizing open data to bring out global issues

By altin on July 10, 2013

alt Starting in July 2013 and for one year, Alex and Margo will travel through South-East Europe, Turkey, India, South-East Asia, Japan and South-America. They are going to take advantage of this opportunity and meet people, collectives and organisations actively working on making information, knowledge and education available for everyone. We are honored to be one of the stops of the duo on Thursday July 25th @ ICK (Innovation Centre Kosovo) from 06:00pm for a dedicated workshop.

The name of their initiative is Open Steps, which is a non-profit project which consist on exploring, documenting and divulging the state of the art in the field of Open Knowledge around the world. The open-steps.org team believes the philosophy behind these topics is of major importance for our society and the future generations. Making information, knowledge and education available for everyone is a big step towards equality where Internet and new technologies should be the tool that communities and governments should employ rationally to achieve this goal.

More about Open Steps: http://www.open-steps.org/

Event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/594756297235750

This workshop is organized by FLOSSK with the help of ICK (Innovation Centre Kosovo).

WORKSHOP DETAILS:

Thanks to the large amounts of open data being released for free on the Internet, we can take a quick glimpse at current issues characterizing our world. Although, this complex data is sometimes difficult to be understood in its initial form.

By going from theory to practice, we will show where data can be quickly gathered from, and by using open source technologies, put it in a visual context to make relevant issues easy to understand. In addition, attendees will be encouraged to discuss topics involving each of us.

The goal of this workshop is also to increase awareness of the importance and benefits of making information available for everybody and how sharing knowledge is one of the steps towards making our planet better.

Table of contents:

  1. Introduction to Open Knowledge and Open Data 1 What are open knowledge and open data? Why do they matter? 2 Examples of administrations and organisations releasing information to the public domain. 3 Transparency in politics as a way to achieve real democracy.
  2. There is so much data out there, and its free! 1 Online sources where you can get open data. 2 World Bank as major data hub.
  3. Why visualization matters 1 Understanding complex problems by looking at simple graphs. 2 Examples of data visualizations we have developed describing worldwide issues in the fields of Politics, Environment, Education and Social development.
  4. Practical session 1 How to build a data visualization in 5 minutes using free online tools.
  5. Technical questions related to the tools used.
  6. Open debate 1 Which data would I like to visualize? Attendees have the opportunity to propose topics and relevant data they would consider interesting to explore. Everyone will be also encouraged to publish their own data visualizations on our platform.

Target groups:

  • individuals or collectives.
  • interested in open source technologies and the philosophy behind open knowledge.
  • searching for data sources for research.
  • working with visualizations.
  • developing a conscious approach to global topics.
  • having general interest in the topic.

Back to updates