Natália Mazotte leads the School of Data in Brazil and is co-director of Genero e Número, a data-driven magazine focused on gender issues.

One of the key aspects of the open data movement is how open data impact local and global realities. It’s been common sense in more recent years that just the releasing of data is not enough to change our societies for the better, holding governments accountable, providing better public policies and services for citizens or tackling inequality. That’s because the use of open data doesn’t necessarily lie in the hands of the common citizen.

We see the change open data can bring through the action of groups of individuals who have skills to understand what’s hidden in the datasets and process that information for mass consumption and reflection. Infomediares have been considered the most important group to get us from numbers and CSV files to actual change. Data journalists are special infomediares playing a vital role in translating complex information into stories that are capable of turning around governments and holding the powerful accountable.

In 2010, the Brazilian government started a program to finance the tuition of undergraduate courses in private institutions at low interest rates, in order to increase the number of students in university. Four years later, the program had already received 9 billion USD of public money, despite the fact that the growth of enrollment in private schools had dropped and transfers of federal funds for private education groups had risen. This information was made public not by an official assessment of the program’s effectiveness, not even by the common citizen, but from an open data-driven story published last year by a data journalism team at a newspaper.

After the story, the government revamped the program.

Argentine citizens can monitor all the details of legislative activity thanks to an application created by the newspaper La Nación, the Congresoscopio, and based on open data about the Congress. They also rely on a journalistic initiative of fact-checking that, by using data, checks the veracity of political speeches, which encourages governments, media, and companies to be accountable and tell the truth.

In early April, 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists worked with 2.6 terabytes of leaked data from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and unveiled the functioning of tax havens and a vast corruption scheme among the world’s political elite, revealed by local journalists around the world. It ignited investigations on those public figures and a debate on tax reform and tax havens regulation.

The examples are everywhere and represent just the tip of the iceberg in a media landscape where we still lack tech-savvy professionals and more clarity on how newsrooms are conducting their data-driven investigations, especially in developing countries.

At School of Data, we believe that by supporting and training more journalists — as well as other infomediaries — we can encourage more data-driven stories that could lead to social change, with visualizations and solutions that can help civil society understand their issues and stimulate leaders to take action. Several journalists, from independent and traditional outlets, who have participated in trainings facilitated by our network have already helped organized groups reach inspiring results on the ground. They are part of an emerging and vibrant community that has been created around our workshops, online content, and Fellowship Programme.

That’s why capacity building for infomediaries is a major element to move forward in the open data agenda. In order to make more infomediaries data-literate we need to identify the competencies required for each group and each context, the skill gap by region and gender, the practical examples that unlock the potential of open data, and the best methodologies.

We also need to build bridges between those who create policies and standards to collect and release datasets and those who are skilled enough to extract meaning from them. Positive incentives such as awards for best stories – which also helps to identify real cases — and more interdisciplinary sessions and events, bringing together different actors, are some of the ideas we need to discuss as we come together at IODC16.

 

Featured image: Kash Goudarzi.