How journalists and the open data movement can join forces: ODX13 presentation | Montreal Gazette

Use the links to access the slide presentation that accompanies the following text: "I had the privilege of being a lightning speaker at the Open Data Exchange this past weekend, alongside several other people doing fascinating things with data. Here is a summary of my talk: Journalists and open data activists share the same core concerns: We don’t trust power. We want better access to information that we paid for as taxpayers We want to empower citizens to make better decisions using good information. We can be powerful allies in these quests by putting our strengths together.  A lot of open data folks come from programming backgrounds. They can write lovely Python scripts to scrape and reshape data, craft expert SQL queries to ask pointed questions of data and make exquisite table joins, and create advances visualizations.  These are skills that are missing in most newsrooms, skills that can add a lot of power to news stories.  On the other hand, journalists are expert communicators who can build powerful narratives from information  and help readers connect with data by finding the human element within.  Journalists and open data folks approach data differently, and we have different questions that we want to data to answer. We have different ideas for data projects. By exchanging these ideas, we can come up with better projects than we would in isolation.  For example: many open data people want to make slick apps with data.  Apps are great! Who doesn’t love apps? But apps are one way of presenting that data, and in a non-curated way. It’s still throwing data at users and asking them to find the story themselves. Which is fine at one level.  But I do believe – and data visualization experts will back me up on this – that people like being shown what the main takeaway is. All data need an explanatory layer: What story do the data tell? Who’s winning? Who’s losing? How fast it is changing? Is there a correlation? Who are the outliers?  It’s the story that will pull readers in to explore the data further, and seek their own stories inside them.  And if the story is good: Our readers will surely want to know more about the people who complied and presented the data, and play with their apps ..."