Africa Media Initiative's Justin Arenstein on Data Journalism at IPI, Indigo Trust and AMI Press Breakfast in Cape Town

News You Can Use:!Creating News Tools + Services That Give Audiences Actionable Information

Citizen focused: !We build mass mobilisation tools, to give ordinary citizens “news they can use” with personalised + localised information, along with strong feedback loops to improve audience engagement.

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Demand driven: !News needs to be more than just rhetoric. It needs to speak to the real-world challenges facing citizens. And, it needs to be underpinned by a economic imperatives.

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Outcomes based: !We aim for 'outcomes' not just 'outputs'. Our metric for success is meaningful impact, that creates lasting change. We also aim for scalability and/or replication in all our initiatives.

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Pipeline strategy: !To build a self-sustaining ecosystem, you need catalytic mechanisms that support the germination and growth of open data champions. !Our 'pipeline' strategy uses a modular approach to provide incremental access to resources, skills, support systems, and various acceleration mechanisms.

News Tools:!These need to be action-orientated to be meaningful. They should help citizens decipher & navigate the complex forces shaping their worlds. They should support evidence-based public discourse & decision-making .

http://GotToVote.co.ke

GotToVote:!A data-driven application that helped citizens find their election registration centers, and then helped track polling results, plus allowed them to send 'peace messages' to fellow voters.

http://www.labs.code4kenya.org/StarHealth/

Star Health:!A suite of data-driven tools that help citizens check if their doctors are in 'good standing', whether their treatment / prescriptions will be covered by health insurance, and where their nearest medical specialists are.

FindMySchool:!A data-driven application that helps parents track & compare academic performance at schools, as well as identify schools their children will be channelled into, based on performance.

http://findmyschool.co.ke/

Liberating Data: !By digitizing documents and knowledge within media, academia, and civil society, we're turning 'deadwood' archives into new digital 'structured data' resources, with open APIs to allow for 3rd party re-use.

! sourceAFRICA + connectedAFRICA - turning parliamentary, newsroom & university archives into machine readable data

http://sourceAFRICA.net

Building the Backbone:!Much like the railways powered industrialisation, Africa needs data infrastructure, including data and code repositories, and an AfricanCommons resource hub. We've adopted a modular, community-centric approach.

http://OpenAfrica.net

! openAFRICA.net - the continent's largest volunteer-run open data respository

Forensic Tools / Research Desks: !Tracking money, deciphering contracts, and pinning down company ownership is difficult. ID creates a centralized research team to help newsrooms / transparency activists.

http://InvestigativeDashboard.org

New Business:!Most African media don’t believe that granular data exists - and even if it does, they believe it is too complex for newsrooms or citizens to use meaningfully.!Proof-of-Concept prototypes that demonstrate both accessibility and ease-of-use help build diversified or new revenue streams.

KickstartingA Continent: !Building on the success of the Kenyan pilot, we have launched in 4 countries, creating CitizenLabs & embedding data fellows, to build the underlying infrastructure + prototypes that produces proof that data tools work.

http://DataBootcamp.org

2 - Data Literacy Skills: !We host data literacy bootcamps and masterclasses, develop course materials, and convene strategic policy roundtables + catalytic hackdays across Africa to develop data skills & knowledge.

! Nairobi Data Bootcamp 2012

3 - Building Community!We're creating a diverse community of civic hackers, data activists and data narrators through a pan-African network of Hacks/Hackers chapters, citizen tech desks in incubators, and 'kickstarter' Code for Democracy co-creation events.

!Hacks/Hackers

! Code4Democracy

!

!d|Roundtables strategy sessions !d|Clinic project planning

!MediaParty data summits#EditorsLab hackathons

Partnerships: !We're building a demand-driven eco-system of data creators + curators and data analysts + narrators, partnered with grassroots citizen movements.

Thank You !

@JustinArenstein