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Alternative narratives: Telling stories through open data

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Alternative narratives: Telling stories through open data
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Nowadays, the empowerment of subjects from poor classes necessarily involves access, diffusion and production of information. The narratives built by the hegemonic media and, on the other hand, by the new channels of communication that appear in the global peripheries are proof that the data are in dispute in the world. To whom do data belong? For whom are they more or less available? How to make the data visible to guarantee new narratives that allow the development of communities of rights?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
It's nice to see all of you here, and thank you for taking the time to visit our session.
I'm Denise. I'm from the Open Data Lab based in Jakarta. And I will talk to you. I will share our experiences with you in using photography to make data more understandable for, basically, regular people. So let's start with a quick raise of hands. How many of you have any social media account?
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. How many of you have an email? Really, not everyone? I'm surprised by that. Almost everyone here, obviously, has either a social media account, or has an email, or uses Google Maps, or Siri,
or one of those things. And the very fact that you are all in Republica means that, obviously, you have data traces. You have data breadcrumbs. You have produced data, and you are also a consumer of data. So data is everywhere.
Now, the challenge that remains is that there's this imbalance. A lot of us, everyone produces data, but not everyone fully understands the power or the influence of data. And there's still this disparity wherein not everyone can make full use of data because of that lack of understanding.
And that's what we're trying to address today with this session. I'm going to talk about our experience with using data, and particularly open data in Indonesia. And with the Jakarta Lab, with the Open Data Lab in Jakarta, what we try to do is we try to make data work for everyone, whether they integrate it
into their work, or they use it to empower their communities, as I will talk about in a bit, or even just to have a better understanding of their surroundings. So I'm not sure, but how many of you have seen the exhibit just directly outside, like between the stage one and the networking area?
Awesome. It's so awesome that some of you have seen it. For those of you who haven't yet, I highly encourage you to please drop by and take a look at it, because that's what I'm going to be talking about. It's a project that we call Data to Life, Life to Data. It's made of two components. The first is bringing data to life, wherein we used photography as a means to share the stories
of how data is produced, translated, and consumed. Whether it's through online platforms, or through mobile apps, or through newspapers, the way we consume data affects how we understand data, whether we're government officials, or regular citizens, or something.
There's that correlation between how we produce it and how we consume it, and our understanding of it. The second component is Life to Data, where we show how data represents the realities that people face every day. When we're talking about open data, or specifically open government data, and you look at it,
usually you will just see numbers and blurbs of text that's, unless you're a data analyst, or you have a lot of experience with working with data, you will probably struggle to understand. Me, as a designer, and as a person who works on communications, I still struggle to read just raw data,
so I also admit to that. And what we tried to do is we used photography to actually then make that very data understandable for everyone. So what could be numbers in a government data could translate to clean water sources
in a small village in Indonesia, and how that can also translate to building a small business in Indonesia to manage the trash problem in one of the areas there. So this project, we did it, how did we do it?
It's basically we had four amazing partners who helped us. The biggest help that we had was with Guta Institute, and then we tapped three local partners because they know the field a lot better, and that's super important that you have local partners. We empowered eight organizations,
and we taught them about, through three workshops, wherein we built their skills on data, on ethnography, so they have an understanding of the context, and in photography. In the end, we had 78 photos and five data stories, but here we're only exhibiting 13. So I'll just give you two quick shots,
snapshots of what you will see in the exhibit. The first one is this photo. What does this photo tell you guys? Hopefully it tells something about water. Yes, yes? Okay, awesome. So this was one of the products. This was one of the photos that was there, and the story behind it,
the data story that comes behind it is that there's this local organization, JMKP. They worked with the local government to get access to the data, and reading the data, they found out that 270 million Indonesian rupiahs, that's approximately 2,500 US dollars, were allocated, actually, for projects
that would help resolve water sanitation and access issues. Water access issues. So they used this very information to verify whether actual water, whether infrastructures for access to clean water were made, and after verifying that,
they looked at the impact of this, and some of the things that they found were that access to clean water led to one, more kids being able to stay healthy because they would play around and then they could just clean up afterwards and not be as prone to getting sick. Two, that the local women
did not have to travel long distances anymore to get water from wells, from wells that were more than 25 meters deep, and three, a very interesting finding was that now that people had clean access to water in their homes, they used the public parks less
for their toilet businesses. Can you guys imagine how important that is? So, second photo is, again, we partnered with a local organization, and the story behind that is that they looked into the village-owned enterprises,
I'm trying to formulate it in my head, sorry, they looked into the village-owned enterprises and saw what the byproducts were from there, and they saw that during the forums there were long discussions about what the village should invest in and what problems need addressing
because there was an actual budget to invest for possible enterprises that would benefit the community, and they found that one of the biggest issues that their community had was overproduction of trash, much relatable, I guess, for a lot of other areas, but then they decided to work on a project
or invest in an enterprise that would solve that, and this one is called Amarta, and you can find more of the story outside. Yeah, so, just very quickly, one of the biggest challenges that we found was when you have different stakeholders,
one, government, where you have to get the data from, two, different organizations that you're partnering with with different levels of skills in photography and reading data, it's very, very challenging, but with the right steps and with a lot of time and with patience, if you have very committed partners,
if your project is very fit for a purpose, then you can really succeed in it. Yeah, so, again, we're at the Open Data Lab in Jakarta. We are based in Jakarta. We have most of our projects in Indonesia, but we also have it in the Philippines and in other areas. We work with open data,
and we try to find solutions to social problems using it, and we are kind of a baby organization of the World Wide Web Foundation. You can see the exhibit outside between stage one and the networking area. You can find out more about us through our website
and our Twitter account. Follow us, and now I will hand you over to Afrey, and after that, to Gilberto.
While they change the computer, we welcome Afrey Luna. He's from Bogota, Colombia, and he's one of the founder of Hackerspace in Colombia, which is called Hackabo. Also, he's a consultant for, well, improving the skills and leveling the ground in Colombia
when it comes to enabling, telling the stories with data, with open data. Afrey Luna, getting ready.
So this will be like a really, really quick talk. For me, 10 minutes in English is like a lot, so it's fine. Well, first, thank you for having me here and for being here. So the idea is that I will talk about
what we are doing with data in Colombia, and we are trying to do this from a design approach. That means that we are trying to do an active understanding, trying to understand the staff by doing the stuff, so I will try to tell you about the relationship between artifacts and communities. I will talk first about the place where this is happening
and after that, a community in particular, the place is, or Hackerspace, that is a physical space, and also is a digital space, is also located in the cyberspace. So we are mostly floss, freely open source software
advocates, like we have new members also, but mostly are old-timers, and it's a place that is self-assembled, it's, yeah, we're in the space by yourself, it has not any formal organization behind, what gives us a lot of freedom, and we have this practice that is called the Data Week.
So I will call about this Data Week stuff. The Data Week is some kind of combination between a workshop and a hackathon. So it's a workshop because it's about learning by doing, and by example, and it's also a hackathon because it's about intensive prototyping and community building.
For me, a hackathon, a real hackathon, not the fashion is one, like now, but the real hackathon is a bridge between the past and the future of a community. So we are trying to make that in that space. And it's about also deconstructing power. So that's the idea.
In our hackathon, we have a lot of different profiles, so our idea is not about having these big hackathons with selfies and stuff like that, it's more about having a lot of people from different places. And also, we are trying to work on capacity building inside the community, and inside the infrastructure.
So it's not about this kind of forgetful hackathon where we do the stuff again and again and again, but we try to change the platform to put this kind of capacity inside the platform. So the next time we do the hackathon, the platform can address more complex problems. And we are trying to deconstruct critical divides.
One is between software user and developer. We don't believe, it's a real divide now, but it's a false one between having these, the people who code and the people who don't, and this idea that you need to go to the coder. We want to create code as a common language, a wider language. We think that we can create stuff together
if we have more wider common languages, and one of them is coding. So we think that tools, model, or thought, and if we have only a hammer, the problem with that is that, well, all the stuff start to see like the same,
because that's the way that we model or thought, so all the presentations are in PowerPoint, all the writings are in Word, but we think that it could be the other way around. So instead of having a single tool for different problems, we try to adapt the tool so it can be like working for a particular,
probably a particular way. So we have this kind of very flexible problems that try to adapt to the, to the very flexible tools that try to adapt to the problem. This is a first example of what we are doing there. It's called, it's about like visualization of,
well, it doesn't look so nice here, but it's looking nice in a bigger resolution. So what we do was try to map absence of information. We start with this visualization from The Guardian that is mapping like lack of rights for the gay people,
and we use that as a model for another problem about mapping absence of information for health, yeah, medicines. So we made some kind of changes there, and after that, we got this visualization in particular. So we start with the problem, not with the data, and we start to modify the tool to suit the problem.
Another critical divide that we are trying to address is the idea of data. So we think that data is the answer to a question that could be asked in a different way. So some data is in multiple, like the speed of light.
In Futurama, it's not, but it is a fact. But most of the data is all designed. We create tools to capture data, and we put them a lot of our thinking of what is data. So an important question for us is who becomes data of who?
Most of the time, the power relationships are that the people without power becomes data of the powerful ones. That means usually governments and big corporations. But we think that we can reverse this datafication process, so create data from the bottom up
about what these big companies or entities are doing. And one example, ah, well, in other ways, we are trying to make really simple infrastructures, not these kind of infrastructures that are really complex now, and we are trying to criticize the gap
between big and small data. So we try to create what we call pocket infrastructures that are infrastructures that work online or offline that fit in your pocket and that has all the what is needed inside them. So we have two examples here.
One is about Panama Papers. What we do was to create a mini site with a visualization and kind of a continual environment. So it is that you have a single place where you can go from data to queries to code to be able to documentation in a single place. Not what we have now that is just raw data
behind the browser and the browser to just click. We're having this kind of bridge between raw data and all the stuff that is going between data and the final visualization in the browser. And we want also to make this, it's not properly showed here, but the idea is that all these artifacts
has a public history. So you can trace what is happening and how this visualization and documentation and interactive stuff was built. And finally we have this project that is called the Twitter Data Selfies. We are trying to show, we started with a question also
and we start with paper. This is about if someone is making a dialogue or a monologue in Twitter. So this is the Twitter profile. This is the amount of tweets and replies. And this is the main words that he's tweeting
or she's tweeting. This is the profile that she's replying to. And this is the replies, the profile that he's replying to. So in this kind of visualization we try to see the amount of dialogue and monologue. Who is talking with who, from the point of view of the one
who is making the tweets. And we start with this analog graphic and start to make some changes and to write the code for getting this kind of visualization. And this is the result of the end of the hackathon. It takes a week. So at the end the people start to take their own data selfies.
The idea is to invite people in power. So politicians, open foundations. That's the idea, okay. Thank you.
So now we're gonna listen to Gilberto Villara from Brazil. And he's working in the field of enabling from cultures of young people in favelas also.
And right, Gilberto? Yes. So and well, it's a little bit of a rush but I think the next one will be. And also just in case everybody's here we will just continue with the next subject also the six billions. How entrepreneurship is enabling leveling the ground with digital help. Also just stick to the ground
and take some time.
So hello everybody. I'm Gilberto.
And in 2012 I went to Rio de Janeiro. To work on observatory favelas on Mare. And Mare is one of the biggest favelas in Brazil. And I used to work on a maker space. It's called Labi. Working on bringing diversity to technology production.
So it's important to localize the favelas here. There are more than 700 in Rio. More than one billion people. It's 22% of population. And the Brazilian Institute of Statistics consider normally these areas like subnormal agglomerate.
And this is just an illustration of how the official narratives about favelas cause prejudice and distinction. The political action in these spaces are based on the security and ostensible presence of the police. The political action eliminated the diversity, art and human productions from favelas.
And we need to see this issue from a new paradigm. The result of this political action is a genocide against the black and young population that's historically stigmatized in Brazil. We are the country where more kills in the world. In 2012, 56,000 people were murdered.
Of these, 30,000 are young people between 15 and 29 years old. And of those, 77% are black. Most homicides are committed by firearms and less than 8% of the case can be executed. In this context, the Obiservatore de Favelas
and now the new Institute Maria and João Aleixo aims to implementing an agenda of rights to the city based on a new definition of Islam extending these to public policies. Well, especially me, since last year,
I've been working on a project called Data Lab that is a laboratory located in Maré and run by seven youngsters to develop stories about ourselves through the open data and digital tools, bringing to the main discussion visibility, identity and participation.
I bring here for you some examples of our work. Just to illustrate, here's a portrait of the woman who dies in pre-pregnant, pregnant and post-pregnant in the state of Rio de Janeiro between 2009 and 2013. They are young, black and low education level. Who discovered that and wrote that
and designed that is a woman like that and that makes difference. Another fellow tried to use data about transgender produced by the Brazilian government and he discovered that they produced zero data and we need to see this population in Brazil.
On the end of last year, we mapped collectives, newspapers, blogs that make what we call communitarian communication and the map is open and collaborative. Exploring the concept of citizen-generated data, we are developing a project that use a WhatsApp number
to build a new database about sanitation in the city and we discovered the sustainable development goals and this is the reason of these small squares there and we think we have an important hole on that and we do not want to be left behind. Well, we don't have many certainties but questions
like how to promote collaboration, how to think and promote public policies through our work, how to encourage young networks, how to influence on that SDGs and more how to sustain ourselves. I'm open to think and learn with you.
Thank you and follow us. I think we have a little few minutes if you want to ask something for us or make some commentaries. I think we have some little minutes.
I don't know but thank you. Any questions? Well, there's so many world and there's so little republica to put it in but thank you all of you three
and well, it's difficult to develop one question to all the three of you so I'm just, just for the last part, how is it in Brazil when you work with official players and with the community? How do you, is there any, is it still very grassroots or is there, how is it becoming a structure?
Is there help from some official part already or is it still very hard, in a hard fight? No, I don't think so. I think there's some difficulties to come inside and work with people but I think when you are open to that,
we work with many NGOs and many grassroots groups and collectives and there's, like I said, many collectives, many groups organized in favelas that are open to work, open to exchange with other parts of the city
so I don't think that's not a challenge, you know? I think it's a natural thing. I think that's happened when you are every day working with and discussing and exchanging with the people. Hello, I'm Kostel Manka from Goethe-Institut in Jakarta
and I just want to share that the project that Denise was talking about with the exhibition was actually born here because we met first at Republika. We are both in Jakarta but it's a very big, big city so we met here at Republika two years ago and we decided we have to do something together and then we did this and other projects as well
and the next one is already in the making so Republika does change lives and does bring projects to life. Thank you, Republika.