Evento
For one more year, the VI Data Journalism and Open Data Workshop takes place at Medialab Prado (Alameda 15, Madrid), on this occasion organized by "Datalab". This is a meeting aimed at journalists, programmers or anyone interested in generating content using data. The meeting takes place between April 19 and 22 with the participation of different representatives from public administrations, companies, research groups, social organizations and experts.
This event is part of the Data Journalism Workshop, composed of 5 sessions (we spoke about it in a previous article). The topics included in the current agenda revolve around the Sustainable Development Goals (also known by the acronym SDG or Agenda 2030, because we project these objectives towards 2030), a project approved by the UN for "end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity".
Under the slogan, Data of the SDGs, the different sessions of this Conference focus on the fight against climate change, including different aspects related to the environment in Madrid region. The objective is to create an inclusive event, where participants can acquire knowledge, share their opinion and establish relationships that encourage the creation of data-based stories.
The meeting begins on Thursday 19 at 10 in the morning with a session dedicated to "mobility data", whit the participation of Madrid City data portal, EMT (Municipal Transport Company of Madrid) and its MobilityLabs, among other. On the afternoon, there is a critical session on the SDGs, with the participation of Carmen Borja Segade, of ISI Argonauta, José Manuel Naredo, economist and statistician, and Ignacio Santos Molina, consultant on environment, development and international cooperation.
On Friday 20 in the morning, there is a symposium of touristification data, one of the contents that has created most interest, organized together with Montera 34. This symposium include, in the afternoon, the beginning of the touristic data workshop. During 3 sessions - Friday afternoon and Saturday and Sunday morning - we manage some tools for obtaining, cleaning and analyzing data. The objective is to collectively produce a report that helps to understand the impact of rental platforms for tourist accommodation in Madrid, using the question and answer method.
In addition to these contents, the VI Data Journalism and Open Data Workshop is also useful to present different initiatives related to data and SDGs, such as the Tipi Ciudadano project (Friday 20, 18 hours), an online tool that facilitate to follow the activity of @Congreso_es related to poverty and inequality, with its scanner and personalized warning system – in July 2018 it will also focus on compliance with the SDGs-; the Innovation and Human Rights project (Saturday 21, 18 hours) that promotes innovation to protect human rights; the presentation of the projects approved in the first round of data journalism workshop (Saturday 21, 16 hours); the session of JournoCodersMAD (Saturday 21, 17 hours); or the latest news in data training according to the "Specialization Diploma in Data Journalism and Visualization of Blanquerna".
You can see the full and updated agenda on its website and you can follow the ewent through the hashtags #datosods or #jpd18, or the accounts @datalabx and @jpdatos on Twitter. 
Evento
On 10 October, the Adaday 2017 conference will be held in the Media Lab Prado auditorium entitled: “Challenges and perspectives in data journalism”. It takes place within the Encuentro Aporta 2017 programme, which this year is celebrating its seventh edition. Coinciding with Ada Lovelace day, the first female programmer in history, this conference will deal with innovation, training and perspectives in data journalism and will go into detail on women in IT, paying special attention to making the work of women in the world of IT more visible, a subject very relevant to data journalism.
The aims of this debate and analysis conference are to define the characteristics of relevant journalism projects within the field of data journalism, mainly developed by women, and to identify data journalism as an ally of public policies and a key instrument for creating public value and fuelling the innovation system. Furthermore, the conference aims to highlight the need for data and, specifically, quality public data to be able to conduct quality data journalism. Finally, it also aims to propose actions to be able to accelerate the development of data journalism in our country.
The conference has been structured into two discussion panels. The first of them, “Women and data journalism”, chaired by Asunción Bernárdez, Director of the Institute of Feminist Research at the Faculty of Information Sciences (UCM) will start at 18:00. Regarding speakers, Carmen Galdón from Ciudad de las mujeres, Patricia Horrillo from Editatonas of Wikiesfera, Montserrat Boix, head of gender at UGT-RTVE and Marta Verde, programmer and artist, Fefa Vila, socióloga especialista en Estudios Feministas y Estudios Culturales, directora artística de El porvenir de la revuelta, Mabel Delgado, de PyLadiesMadrid, Sara Gil Casanova, física y divulgadora científica, Akelarre Ciberfeminista y su kit de autodefensa ciberfeminista y Sara Román Navarro, departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática de la UCM, will participate in this debate.
The second panel is entitled “Innovation, training and perspectives in data journalism” and its aim is to propose actions to be able to accelerate the development of data journalism in our country. Regarding speakers, Olaya Argüeso, coordinator of the Data Journalism Master’s Degree, Research and Visualisation of the Editorial Unit/URJC, María Zuil from El Confidencial, Millán Berzosa, Head of Spain and Portugal at Google News Lab, Victoria Anderica, open data for the Madrid City Council, Adolfo Antón Bravo, coordinator at DataLab (the MediaLab Prado data laboratory), and Yolanda Quintana, portavoz de la Plataforma en Defensa de la Libertad de Información. Dicho debate será moderado por la periodista de datos Ana Isabel Cordobés, will participate in this debate. It will be chaired by the data journalist Ana Isabel Cordobés.
The conference will be transmitted via streaming and videos of the debates will be published online. You can also follow the debate in social networks with hashtags #ald17 #adaday2017 and # Aporta2017.
Noticia
Every item of data counts. And even more so where well-identified and structured data is concerned. A single gap such as gender in datasets can mean a great deal. The Data Journalism Conferences, which have been held in MediaLab Prado thanks to Data Lab, this year reached their 5th edition with the slogan "every item of data counts". From May 3 - 6, journalists and others interested in communication, journalism and data attended the various workshops, talks and round tables.
How to request data from the administration? How to find data on the website of the National Institute of Statistics? What options does the New York Times API offer? What about the National Statistics Institute? Can one automate statistical queries? What possibilities for analyzing tweets does the open tool TCAT have? Why do they call it visualization when they mean map? What can be done and how with Bootstrap? These were some of the topics and sessions of the 2017 Fifth Data Journalism Conference: data visualization, cartography, new editing and analysis tools, and coding.
The first session was conducted by Esperanza Zambrano, deputy director for claims of the Council of Transparency and Good Governance, who explained the procedure for the public in general and journalists in particular to carry out requests for data management. She detailed some of the most common problems: the data does not exist at the time of making the request, the request is denied for commercial interests or data protection, etc. "The Transparency Law provides the legal framework for citizens to request data, and when it comes to making a request for information it is important to be clear about exactly what we want and which administration possesses it, even though the Council portal itself processes requests for data and redirects them". In Spain, requests for information require identification - electronic or paper - but not motivation. Information is public.
The use of APIs was addressed in two practical workshops: the use of the NYT API with the R programming language and how to access the API of the National Statistics Institute (INE) website. Inés Huertas, of Datatons and Data Science Madrid, and Leticia Martín-Fuertes, of R-Ladies, demonstrated this programming language that allows data scientists to manage large volumes of statistical data, is open source and offers a variety of libraries and graphic display capability. Laura Guerrero, INE, stressed: "We are giving visibility to the API and the interesting thing is that the user can automate statistical queries". Data series, data tables or metadata.
"Capturing Twitter data is a challenge". Alberto Abellán and Saya Saulière showed the open source TCAT tool focused on social analysis and research. An open tool that allows two things: on the one hand capture of tweets and on the other hand twitter analysis data: "let the data do the talking."
Open data and services in the world of cartography. The new data policy of the National Centre for Geographic Information - CNIG - was presented as part of this conference by Antonio F. Rodríguez, who detailed data and open services in cartography (municipalities, population bodies, maps, roads, etc.) and how bureaucratic and technical barriers to data availability and use have been eliminated. Recently, we gave an account on our open data portal of CNIG's latest developments regarding open data.
Installation and editing tools utilities such as Bootstrap, useful tools for working with data, such as the Cygwin console or the Emacs editor, or Screple, a data visualization tool, also had their space and time in this conference, which also offered the round table: "New forms of visualization and electoral analysis", with the participation of Juan Enrique Cotillas, Deputy Director of Infographics and Graphic Design for RTVE, and Kiko Llaneras, El País. The digital and paper integration of Diari Ara was another of the presentations, in which the person responsible, Auri García, reminded the audience that stories involving narrative are more valued and read than pure data.
The 2017 5th Data Journalism Conference was inaugurated on May 3 - World Press Freedom Day - and also coincided with the second session of the production workshop of data journalism that is taking place over three alternate weekends in April, May and June.
Evento
Madrid City Council has announced the first edition of the Datathon and Data Journalism Awards, aimed at entrepreneurs, developers, designers, journalists and students interested in open data. The aim of this competition is to foster the re-use of public sector information, promote http://datos.madrid.es/ and convert it into, not only a point of access to local datasets, but into a tool to boost the development of innovative solutions based on open data.
The awards are divided into two different categories; firstly a Datathon where participants will develop an innovative solution based on the re-use of local datasets such as a computer applications a websites or a data visualizations.
Individually or in groups, projects must be submitted under the AGPLv3 license and, in the case they include data from other sources, the participant must be entitled to use them in accordance with the regulations.
In parallel, the Data Journalism Awards presents two different categories; one for professionals, where newspaper articles written from 2015 to date will be assessed. And secondly, a category for students to award the best texts published in any type of media, or piece of work belonging to their studies. In both cases, the content must be related to the activity of the Madrid City Council, re-using the local open data.
To be eligible, the applicant have to submit his proposal according to the application form available on Madrid website or electronically on the website created for the Datathon and Data Journalism Awards. The deadline is 6th August.
Noticia
Technological advances and open data movement have been factors in progress in the journalistic sphere. Nowadays, these professionals combine financial reports, interpret municipal budgets and explore geospatial information to generate stories based on large amounts of data. Data journalism investigates the sources of information, open or not, to build a bridge between data and citizens who need that information is treated, interpreted rigorously and understandable across different formats: articles, graphics, visualizations or interactive applications.
Open data would not only be a resource for the development of new services and products that boost job creation and economic growth; they are also essential for citizen participation and democratization of public processes. At the moment, there is still a large number of citizens who are unaware of the potential of open data and ignore its role for the whole society. For these reasons, data journalism has become so valuable; without it many open data would remain hidden, losing the information that this group can generate from them, and diminishing its powerful social value.
However, none of this would be possible if these experts find obstacles on their way to information and the subsequent story. Restricted access, non-reusable formats or licenses that block the re-use are barriers, many times insurmountable, that hamper their research work; a key element for a well-informed society.
In order to find possible solutions to these challenges and promote data journalism in this industry, during the month of May two big meetings will be held for national and international community of data journalism. For the fourth year in a row, the Jornadas de Periodismo de Datos (Data Journalism Conference) are held in Madrid from 5 to 7 May. Through lectures, workshops, panel discussions and debates attendees will be able to bring positions and share their knowledge on investigative journalism, visualizations, open data, digital literacy, security and privacy.
To develop a program tailored to the professionals needs, participants can collaborate in the elaboration of the agenda, suggesting topics or workshops, presenting projects or performing demonstrations of their initiatives. To do this, the event organization has opened a collaborative section where ideas can be presented. During the conference, international experts will participate such as Sandhya Kambhampati from Correctiv.org (Germanu); Antonio Cucho from Ojo Público (Peru); Marcos Vanetta from Continuum.io (USA) and the data editors from the The Washington Post, Kaeti Hinck and Helena Bengsston from The Guardian. The latter is one of the most relevant newspapers in data journalism, which has a multidisciplinary team formed by journalists, programmers, computer scientists and professionals with other technical profiles, all of them working together to develop the information for its data section.
Attendance is open and free; nevertheless, those ones interested in attending the conference need to register in advance through the digital platform Meetup or getting a ticket via Eventbrite. Those who cannot attend the meeting will have the opportunity to follow the event in streaming or on Twitter by following the hashtag #JPD16.
Only a few days later, the city of New York will host the Data Journalism Unconference, an event organized by the private entity Thomson Reuters where eighty participants from the five continents will meet on May 10 to discuss about data journalism without borders.
On many occasions, data journalists work on stories with international impact; however, they rarely have the opportunity to exchange best practices and new models with colleagues from other countries. Processes and working methods differ depending on the point on the planet where we are and, for this reason, discovering the point of view of journalists from Asia, Africa, Europe and America can be a really useful and enriching experience. In this context, this event aims to be a meeting point where professionals from around the world find solutions to challenges of data journalism and international collaborations help build a viable future for this discipline.
Both events are supported by Google platform for journalists, News Lab; whose goal is to organize information and make it universally accessible and useful through a resource center that provides tools, programs and data for professionals and entrepreneurs. So, Google offers up to four different tool categories -research, report, distribution and optimize- for journalists to improve their information searches, create new data visualizations or increase the distribution of news .
Today more than ever, media are opening up new ways to investigate, discover and create informative content based on data; however, it is still necessary to continue working on open access to information, public and private, and the development of tools to facilitate the extraction, treatment and, of course, data transformation.
Noticia
Once a large number of open data events took place last 5th March to commemorate International Open data Day, the national community is still working on data organising different meetings at regional and national level, where experts of different sectors reflect about the revolution of opening up information.
This week is opened by the workshop “From Open data to Big Data” organized by public entity Open Data Euskadi together with Innobasque. The event, which takes place in Bilbao, has been designed as an opportunity for SMEs, freelancers, students and agents interested in big data to dialogue on innovation and competitiveness in the region at the same time they discuss about legal barriers and professional profiles needed to make the most of data value.
In addition, during the event the Open Data Euskadi prizes will be awarded, contest held in the third quarter of 2015. In order to promote the culture of re-use in Basque Country, the competition was divided into two contests in which, on one hand, the best idea and, secondly, the best app based on open data were selected.
Only two days after, thursday 17th of March, the University of Alicante organizes a new edition of Open Data Meetings, focussing on the opportunity of entrepreneurship and the impact of open data in citizen participation and accountability.
The agenda, divided in two sessions, will include the strategic vision of different international open data organizations as the node of Open Data Institute (ODI) in Madrid or the Maderata, a network of opening up research data. Afterwards, the programme will be based on open data entrepreneurship, presenting the initiatives developed within the project of University of Alicante, UA:Emprende.
Some weeks later, for the fourth year in a row, Open Knowledge Spain organizes the annual Data Journalism Conference that gathers in Medialab-Prado -Madrid- the national community to take part in the different workshops, roundtables, conferences and discussions that will take place from 6th to 7th May. The program of the conference is not yet closed and any user can make a proposal regarding to the following topics: research journalism, visualization, open data, digital literacy, security and privacy of communications.
Attendance is open and free, upon registration through the Meetup platform as the number of places available is limited. Nevertheless, for those people not able to attend the conference, the meeting will be broadcasted through video streaming on the website.
For further information about open data events worldwide, follow datos.gob. in Twitter where the most important events are published together with developments, projects and initiatives to open up and re-use open data.