By on April 21, 2017
The Code for Ghana team loves working with data because it reveals hidden insights and points out areas that need immediate action to be taken.The is a recap of what we did for the first quarter of 2017.
For, we have been able to work on three data stories namely, “Longest-serving African Presidents (December, 2016)”, “Mobile Money Statistics and Opportunities in Ghana” and “Motor Accidents in Ghana 2016 (Infographic)”. For the motor accident data story, we did different infographic visualizations to depict various aspects of the data set. In all these data stories generated interesting conversations amongst our online followers. We are hoping that these conversations don’t start and end on social media. Our main aim is to present open data in a much understandable format for the average Ghanaian to be informed about government’s dealings and also alert policy makers to take action. Here is a visualization depicting how much engagements these data stories received on twitter.
We have had 2 events so far, highlights of these events are as follows.
Open Data Day 2017: The International Open Data Day is an event organized by various groups all over the world to celebrate open data. During such events, data analysts, civic technologist, statisticians etc. come together and work on data projects like data visualizations and simple applications that make data more accessible and understandable to users. Code for Ghana organized the event in Ghana for the third consecutive year this year. The event was attended by various people who are passionate about open data and technology. There were presentations during the early parts of the event to introduce the participants to ‘Open Contracting’, D3 and data scraping. Right after that the participants broke into groups and started working on their projects. At the end of the day, judges awarded the best teams with prizes. You can read all about this year’s open data day 2017 here.
Klarity User Feedback Workshop: Klarity is a Sweden-based organization that is developing a platform to help citizens build more open and transparent society in Ghana. To ensure that the platform serves the purpose for which it is being built, the Klarity team decided to organize this workshop to sample views from Ghanaians from all walks of life. We had two groups of participants. Both sessions were characterized by interesting discussions concerning building a more transparent society in Ghana.
