In November 2011, the Shuttleworth Foundation awarded me a so-called flash grant.
Flash grants are an awesome idea: instead of a full fellowship, a smaller sum of
money is given to people, with only the condition of reporting about their
activities to the world. Since I haven't been blogging very much about many of
the projects in which I've been involved over the last few months, here's a small
recap.
Soon after receiving the grant, I decided that I wanted to use this time to work
on two areas: promoting the idea of open government and open data in Germany and
helping advocates and journalists to make sense of open data and to use it for their
purposes.
Open Data in Germany
In Germany, things are either done very properly or not at all. Many options are
considered, few are tried out. While adopting this attidude in opening up governemnt
is not surprising for political actors, German geeks seem to be doing the same:
instead of using their technical skills to create digital civic infrastructure, many
are now running for office. While this is an interesting development, it also means that there are few interesting open government initiatives.
OffenesParlament - a legislative tracking site.
As a demonstration of the kinds of tools needed, I spent a lot of time in October
and January trying to to productize OffenesParlament, a legislative tracking site for the federal parliament. It allows citizens to easily
search parliamentary business, speeches and to subscribe to updates about a specific
topic or politician. The site has recently entered entered its beta phase and we're now actively seeking more coders to help with
further development.
But software along is not enough, so together with fukami and the
support of various NGOs (OKFN, CCC, Digitale Gesellschaft and the Open Data Network), I helped to organize a series of hackdays across Germany, in Hamburg, Berlin and Cologne.
The events helped to connect different
data initiatives, but attendance was low, showing a need for more professional organizing.
A working group at the cologne open data hackday.
Based on these experiences of trying to grow the German community, we're currently
in the planning stage of an open government incubator. Our goal is to raise a
small fund which we can use to support civic hackers who want to initiate new
projects — an initiative that is obviously inspired by the flash grant.
Data as a tool for advocacy and journalism
As more and more open data becomes available, the question of how it can
effectively be used to inform public opinion becomes more salient. Two key
groups in this, journalists and advocates, are often inexperienced in using
information technology — not to mention raw data.
In late January, I was able to join the African Media Initiative and the World Bank Institute for a three-day
data journalism workshop in Nairobi, Kenya. As I'm writing this, I am on my way to Chisinau, Moldova, to
contribute to a similiar event organized by the same groups.
Through the OKF, I also had the opportunity to participate in the School of Data
Journalism in Perugia, Italy, and
Data Harvest, a
meeting of EU-focussed investigative reporters in Brussels. I was further able
to lend a (web-designing) hand to the awesome team producing the Data
Journalism Handbook, a
collection of texts about this emerging practice.
Data journalism training in Nairobi.
Although the external conditions of these events are very different, their goals
are very similar. We're trying to establish a dialogue between journalists
and coders, the explore how data can be used to make better news. Our work there
is focissed on introducing journalists to new strategies and tools for information acquisition, processing and presentation. On the other hand, I have learnt a lot about investigating an issue and telling a story from the people I've met.
A recurring technical need articulated both by investigative journalists and
NGOs hat I talked to was a tool for the mapping of actor networks. Such a tool would allow its users to create a
structured analysis of the relations between different companies, persons or
organizations involved in a certain topic.
To explore this question, I teamed up with the Corporate Europe Observatory, LobbyControl and
Friends of the Earth Europe to create a site
around the European Union's lobby register. After creating a prototype
discussion piece in December, a lot of data cleansing work lead into a second
demo version of the site near the end of March.
Second prototype of the EU lobby tracker.
The data work, however, proved not to be the most challenging part of the
project. It became clear that defining how the information can best contribute
to the campaigning goals of the organisations would be key to the site's
development: What is the message? What are the key topics we want to focus on?
We therefore decided to invite the Tactical Technology Collective to join the project and to use their experience in facilitating this design process.
The backend technology of the lobby register project, a software called
Grano,
is a re-usable service for actor and relationship mapping, which I hope to
develop into a journalistic tool in the future. It could help to enable the
evidence-driven analysis of power structures in an accessible way.
Grano: social network analysis for advocacy.
Bottom line
I tremendously enjoyed the freedom afforded by the flash grant. Defining your own
work turns out to be a hard job, but it is a fantastic way to explore a domain
like open data. After taking on a new role as tech lead of
OpenSpending in February, there was unfortunately less
time for me to work on independent projects. Still, I hope that some of the initiatives
spawned over the last six months will evolve into useful tools and active communities.
Many thanks, Mark!