Sitting on a picnic blanket, asking “what should I do with my life” led Lillian Grace to start Wiki New Zealand, a site dedicated to making data accessible and understandable.
She was working for a think tank, and often seeing people who were passionate about issues who unable to find the data they needed.
“I was sitting there with one foot deep in the data world, and one out talking to people and seeing people and thinking ‘you guys really care, and you actually want to know this information, and you just don’t even know it’s there’…So when I saw the difference between available data and accessible data was huge, I was like ‘oh right, this is what I could do’.”
She says the idea of the site, as it is now, came in about 10 minutes. Everyone has data they care about, whether it’s an area they work in, or something they’re passionate about, but no one is an expert at making that data easy to understand.
When we tend to see data in a visual form, it’s because someone is trying to convince us of something.
“It’s all embedded in databases and spreadsheets, so we work to bring all of that as much as possible up one level, into visual form that anyone can have access to data, to understand it, across a variety of topics.”
Most people can’t digest numbers in the same way as just looking at a line, she says. “But one of the important things is that when we tend to see data in a visual form, it’s because someone is trying to convince us of something.”
Lillian says unless people have graph literacy and a good grasp of what to look out for, so they aren't misled. “We’re trying to create a standard of how all the charts and things are shown, so all our graphs start at zero, we try not to dramatise things, if there’s 40 years of data, we’ll show it all, not just the last 6 years.”
The site has been live for about 18 months, and has Lillian and one other full time staff member. It’s in the process of a big change. “I don’t want it to be just the latest and greatest hot thing and then, you know, have a big wave and then be forgotten about. I want to infiltrate it into the way people think about issues.”
Video shot and edited by Ryan Harte.
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