What makes Potsdam thick? The breathtaking castles; what about Ottawa? It’s War Museum and the Rideau Canal; and what about Ibiuna? Does it even sound familiar? So this year the School of Data annual summer camp moves to Ibiuna in Sao Paulo, Brazil. With a population of 76,432, the School of Data will be adding 36 amazing participants from 24 countries in 5 continents to this small municipality. For me, it was a pleasure to be attending the 3rd summer camp in a row. Yippie! and what about this summer camp, hosted by the amazing guys at Escola de dados – lets ride!

The opening sessions on day one was grand with Dirk Slater introducing participants to what to expect in the next 5 days, followed by a breakout interaction where participants get to share why they are interested in this data work or data movement. One fascinating A-ha moment for me in my group was meeting Mariano, a tall, middle aged lawyer from Greece. “I don’t believe in working without been paid, we should find how to create business models that can pay for the good works we do. And just to let you know money motivates me” – He further said. Meeting the likes of Natalia, a Lawyer, teacher and now turned data journalist; Kabu, a new fellow from Zambia who is interested in health data because she feels the relevant datasets are not available in Zambia; Jennifer from South Africa, with a background in commercial ,now in interested in tech for social change, and working with Code for South Africa inspires her many times to continue doing the kind of work with do.

                                Participants at the Opening Circle

The “spectrogram” a facilitation type which breaks participants into groups to figure out controversial statements relevant to the data movements’ and afterward participants will have to move to a side that agrees, disagrees or in between followed, and this got participants thinking with statement ranging from if public interest should override personal privacy; collecting data about ethnicity; open society is better than equal society; data journalism takes too long to be effective; and if we can make open data without computer. These are all great thoughts as we enhance data literacy, but what are your thoughts around these questions? Feel free to add your comments at the end of this post.

Of course the summer camp can’t be more energized without the 15 minutes breaks – so much a time for you to quickly ping your loved ones, have a CAMEL cigarette ;), roll down the cliff, feed on some biscuits, and also have some coffee. “Hey guys, it’s nice to see the sun rising” exclaimed Dirk. Yes, at this time of the year, the mornings were always cold, and no thanks to the heavy storm a night before day 1 which did not allow participants like me have early morning hot bath. However, I was thrilled when Marco said a call was put through to their power holding company at 3.30 am and they came to the neighborhood 1 hr 30 minutes later to fix the electric poles that were affected by the lighting during the rain. Fantastic, right! Especially if you come from my part of the world. Oh I might be wrong, so if you know of any government servicing company in Nigeria that responds to emergencies like this swiftly, please give some thumbs up to them in the comments box below, we’ll be glad you did!

Participants at the Governance track setting up indicators for data trainings

But can you crowdsource the Agenda for an event? That was exactly what we did after the break on day 1, with sticky notes flying around the wall on what participants would love to learn or achieve before they leave the event. Why not? There must be a reason for you travelling far down to Sao Paulo, and you must let the organizers know. The Agenda were grouped into skillshare, communications, membership, Opportunities for Collaboration, and talking about the later the next session was dedicated to knowing what School of Data is in a “standing fair mode”, another instance of speed dating where you get to know how members got started with School of Data, what the role of Open Knowledge International, and the steering committee is, and what members do. It was memorable listening to Sanders narrative on how Open Knowledge started School of Data, and its exit strategy; very captivating listening to Natalia as she patiently defined the 5 members of the steering committee while engagements with Bardhyl (Bar – deal if you need some beers ;)) of Metarmophosis  in Macedonia, and Sylvia in OK France was simply amazing.

So afterwards, was the 2 hours break which was followed by the governance track and the fellowship track. So every summer camp has a list of fellows who are embedded in their countries with different organizations to work on projects with CSOs, and journalists to achieve specific goals. The fellowship track allows fellows (this time we have 10 of them) to meet their partners, work on their deliverable, and help them curate activities they will be carrying out for the entire six month.

The Fellows track where new fellows set up a road map for their activities

Just like you may know, talking about governance could be a tasking and unending issue among non profits, especially when the movement is a network or coalition. I remembered in Potsdam, where the governance talk started, it went into the nights and the conversation was heated up. One good thing that has happened was that the network has moved on from where it was back in 2014 to fixing its governance right, especially with an effective framework, which was consolidated on, at this summer camp. Talks at the governance session included fundraising, membership, fellowship, member support, and of course relationship with Open Knowledge International. In all, one thing remains clear that the School of Data is a small and young organization which would want to grow in a less chaotic way.

It is noteworthy that the School of Data accepts members, however the requirements you will need to look at includes you or your organization being able to establish a relationship of trust with school of data coordinators; send a plan to the steering committee, and if approved, expect to sign an MOU with the school of data. With the present 12 members, perhaps the School of Data might move into another learning year, with conversations that will shape its future for the coming year.

The closing circle at the Summer Camp

One week, so many sticky notes, wobbly internet (no thanks to the heavy rain), great food (No thanks to the hardworking caterers),29 skill shares: The data literacy track which started on day 2 had different skills shared by participants for one hour;and maybe no need to swim in the Itupararanga lake, as the rains were always in to the rescue. As we look forward to the next summer camp, some good memories will linger, like the energetic turkish – Pina; Guatemalan Danny the Elvis; Dirk for his opening and closing circles, and all the sharpies and sticky notes that will forever live in our memories. DATASCHULE!!!

There is  a Wiki at http://wiki.okfn.org/Summer_Camp_2016 where you can get more information about the 2016 summer camp.

Sao Paulo, with the 3rd-greatest concentration of buildings in the world, after New York and Hong Kong hosted the biggest conference on data journalism on May 21, 2016 in Brazil. The conference organized by Escola de dados, and NIC.br  had participants from every continent of the world, thus giving a larger context of how “informediaries” are leveraging on data in writing compelling stories.

With opening remarks by Natalia Mazotte of Escola de dados, the event was kick started by thought provoking insights by panelists on how access to information has not been upheld by government institutions. “There is a particular trend in Latin America, whereby government announces to the world that they have an open data portal, however if you check the portal, you will find it was updated last a long time ago” explained Juan Manuel of SocialTIC. But isn’t this another way of “information – washing” as journalist will be deprived of the information needed? “Journalist should not wait till governments make information public, and also do not rely on the Freedom of Information Act before you start investigating, and that is why we are journalist” Manuel further said.

Natalia Mazotte of Escola da Dados giving opening remarks

Although this was tagged a conference, it turned out to be a series of workshops in one. I love it! Rather than the conference style gathering of people, there were hands-on knowledge exchange sessions that can help participants leapfrog from being a traditional journalist to a data journalist. Sessions that followed the tea break included data analysis for journalist facilitated by Marco Tulio of the Open Knowledge International, which put journalist through how you can use rate, percentages, mode, mean and medium to tell compelling stories and how you can secure yourself digitally as a journalist facilitated by Vadym Hudyma

The data are always out there for journalist, find them, as they are locked in excel spreadsheets, PDFs etc. So Allen Johnson wanted to publish a story on how footballers and technical advisers were earning big in Europe, he found a spreadsheet from France Football Magazine, that has the 2014 salaries of football players and their technical advisers. Voila! It was also in excel, and not PDF (so he won’t be looking for Tabula or online2pdf to convert it). All he did was to use the calculation functions to find the highest paid player, convert the currency to his local currency, and find the average amount that was paid a player. Certainly, you can hand out three different stories to your editor with this table alone, and don’t forget this makes the rule of thumb easier – Start with data and end with a story.

Marco Tulio taking the session on Data Analysis for Journalist

“I have signed up on so many website, and while doing that I use the date of which I first joined in as my password” said Cruz Delirios, “what? That can be dangerous, and I think you should see me after this digital security for journalist session, we need to do a one on one” said Vadym who was totally stricken by Cruz utterance. As journalist, and also a data journalist, hold on a second, a data journalist, also is an investigative journalist who uses data to trail his story, do let me know by commenting below, if you have other insights.

As anyone described above, you should, No! We must use passwords that are not in the dictionary as passwords; encrypt your hard drives, there are now cheaper ways to encrypt; use longer alphanumeric (combination of alphabets and numbers) passwords, so if you are using a 7 digit password, it will take up to 9.2 days, and on average 4.6 days to crack, while if you password is 12 – digit, it will take up to 2,536 years, and on average 1,268 years to crack; cultivate the habit of putting password on your start up screen (either mobile or laptop), I just did! Stop using finger patterns to unlock your screens, patterns are mostly same for everyone; if possible, do not use fingerprints, use PIN and passphrases. Don’t just get an antivirus, always update them.

Furthermore, if you have several passwords to keep, do not save them on your laptop, or write them on your work desk, or in a piece of paper, you can save them at lastpass.com Did you just say why should a newsroom be a target? Perhaps you should read how Newsweek was compromised and how much it cost them to gain back people’s trust, if they ever! Aside this digital attacks, a journalist can be targeted for  physical threats which can be confiscation of your laptop’s, video or digital camera, midget or your backpack, as such you need to always have a backup of your hard drive (probably in the cloud); always copy out data on your video or digital camera immediately after use; and always watch out for someone behind your shoulder – you can be trailed!

You might think you will be covered by human rights law as it regards information, or as a whistle blower, but that is not the case. Even in Australia,with a freedom rating of one, meaning the best in the world, their Border Force Act of last year stated that any disclosure by any current former worker of “protected information” is punishable by up to two years in Prison which led us to the discussion or privacy and transparency at the panel that followed the data literacy workshops that took place after lunch.

Daniel Brammati sharing his work on using data to find Maria Magdalena Tiul Ac

Is Panama Papers or Wikileaks the kind of journalism we should entrench? Shouldn’t journalist consider the motives behind finding this set of data referred to as leaks before publishing them? Fernanda Becker of Intergentes, and Joana Veron of Coding Rights says yes to the latter , and No to the first. Both largely emphasised that journalist should consider that they do not have rights that can protect them, while Vadym Hudyma reiterated the importance of engaging governments at the legislative level, in such a way that they are not allowed to pass bills that encourage their own privacy.

Absolutely, the quest for data journalism is increasing, and great works other than leaks are ongoing, as we saw in the works of Antonio Cucho who worked on tracking electoral data Ojo Publico in Peru; Daniel Villatoro mapping Data in Central America through Plaza Public;Luisa Brito engaging on Data Journalism on TV Globo in Brazil; Daniel Bramatti, using death data to find Maria Magdalena Tiul Ac who has been missing for over 1 year, 1 month and 5 days in Guatemala, and Daniela Flower’s work on Mapping LGBT fobia in Brazil on Huffpost Brazil