Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Philippine Media Practitioners & CSOs are now skilled in using Open Data

Open Knowledge Foundation, an international non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness on the importance of open knowledge and World Bank, empowered civil society organizations (CSOs) and media practitioners with skills to use open data in the recently concluded two-day Data Skills Training held on May 14 and May 17, 2014 at One Global Place in Taguig City.




Some of the CSO representatives who participated during the workshop were from The Asia Foundation, Asia Society Philippines, PinoyME Foundation, INCITEGov, and Code-NGO. Invited media practitioners represented ABS-CBN, GMA News, GMA News Online, Inquirer, Philstar, Rappler, and Solar News.




Ivory Ong of the Department of Budget and Management and Outreach Lead of Open Data PH briefly discussed about the history of the Open Data Taskforce in the Philippines leading to the creation of the National Open Data Portal of the Philippines -- http://www.data.gov.ph "which aims to make national government data searchable, accessible, and useful, with the help of the different agencies of government, and with the participation of the public".

The trainers who conducted the two-day workshop were Anders Pedersen, Knowledge Development Lead of School of Data and Sergio Araiza, a trainer and programmer at Social Tic and Escuela De Datos.

Data driven journalism was discussed on the first day of the workshop. It included topics about planning data investigation and scraping data from websites and pdfs. Through the use of powerful Google-related tools, data from websites such as Philgeps can be downloaded in an easier way, saving time and effort. Data cleaning was also taught, because not all data downloaded were organized. Tables from pdfs can be downloaded using an online tool called Tabula.




Another online tool, onlineocr.net, which Solar News Researchers frequently use to convert pdfs to word documents, was also presented but for the purpose of scraping data from pdfs and convert the data to csv file.

Introduction to data visualization was also part of the first day of the workshop. Techniques on how to present timelines through timeline.knightlab.org and playing data through timemapper were also taught. To visualize the data, the output must be published in a website. On the other hand, tools to create maps with emphasis on locating the coordinates were also presented.

How the readers will appreciate the data presented depends on the design of the data visualization. There were so many ways to visualize the data by creating amazing maps through cartodb.com. Most of the tutorials presented can also be found at http://www.schoolofdata.org.

On the second day of the workshop, Open Data PH Chairman Edwin Lacierda was present. Groups were formed and the participants were taught the use of Google Refine in cleaning scraped or downloaded data. In preparation for the Data Expedition, a sample table from the Bureau of Customs was given to each group. The importance of data expedition is for the journalist to ask himself what he needs to get from the data. There are some data that isn't interesting, or not really needed for the story he is going to write or present, and those need to be eliminated. Data expedition also aims at finding interesting new angles for the story.

All groups presented their outputs. The participants were surprised to learn that their were discrepancies in the data published by the BOC. Regardless of the discrepancies, China is still the top exporter of goods to the Philippines. Other groups presented about which countries pay the highest tax for exportation and many others.

The Data Skills Training came to a close after all groups have presented their outputs and Anders Pedersen have invited all participants to join the School of Data Fellowship program. I'm grateful to be part of this rich and comprehensive training.

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