DA training in Montenegro – making public data more accessible
Yesterday we started the second workshop in the course of the Data Academy project. This time cooperating more closely with the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT), Montenegrin think-thank and watchdog, founder member of ActionSEE network. A group of 15 participants, CDT activists and employees is taking part in a training about data and its usage for activism.
The training is led by Tin Geber from the engine room, supported by Fedja Kulenovic representing Internews BiH and Feride Adili from Open Data Kosovo. Tin is facilitating the whole process, while Fedja is delivering training on data cleaning and analyzing using software like Open Refine or Fusion Tables (not to mention the old good spreadsheets), and Feride teaches everybody what does it mean to scrape a website and how to do it easily (i.e. by using import.io) or in a more advanced way (pure coding for experts).
3 days of data for activists training
First day was devoted to finding the right project to work on during no only the course of the workshop, but up till the POINT conference data-thon in May (btw, you can still apply for a fellowship if you want to come!). The group decided to work on investigating more the conflict of interest issue with the first step on making the data from konfliktinteresa.me website more machine readable and by that more accessible for research and civic investigations. Then stories will be created and visualizations showed to the public – all with the aim of increasing the quality of governance in Montenegro.
Today, split into two smaller groups, participants are learning the specific skills regarding data scraping and cleaning. They have whole day to dig into this — not so easy topics and really have a chance to get familiar with concept and different software. Some of participants were never working with it, so we’re very glad we had a chance to give them this opportunity.
On the last day of the training we will develop a plan for digging into data and for further work.up to POINT Data-thon.
Read more about the Data Academy project – an initiative of Zašto ne and the Action SEE Network along with TechSoup Europe.
Cover picture by sunniako CC BY-NC-SA