Throughout November, InfoTimes is conducting the series of 10 workshops, which were aimed at providing the essential concepts, techniques and skills to effectively work with data and produce compelling interesting data stories.

“It is a privilege for us to help Egyptian journalists learn about this new genre of reporting that takes advantage of the huge number of data sets that are available everywhere,” said Amr Eleraqi, founder and director of InfoTimes. “These courses will cover everything you need to know about infographics and data journalism,” he added.

The workshops are beneficial for both journalists, who have not ventured to do this kind of work before, and practitioners with more experience looking to brush up on the basics of the field. The workshops is also open to people in any field – from designers, developers and public information officers to citizens simply interested in knowing more about these research skills – and it may be particularly useful for editors and managers in the newsroom looking to communicate more effectively with their staff regarding data-based projects.

The workshops cover:

– Basics of Data Driven Journalism.

– Collecting and Scraping Data.

– Analyzing Data.

– Data Visualization.

– Data Mapping.

– Coding for journalists.

All workshops will include videos, tutorials, reading materials, exercises and quizzes.

For more information about the workshops click her, to register please fill this form.

اليوم العالمي للبيانات المفتوحة

يوم البيانات المفتوحة هو إجتماع للمواطنين في مدنهم حول العالم، لكتابة تطبيقات وتحرير البيانات وخلق رسوم بيانية ونشر مقالات وأراء حول إستخدام البيانات العامة المفتوحة لدعم وتشجيع تبني سياسات حكومية تدعو لمزيد من الشفافية من قبل الحكومات المحلية والإقليمية والوطنية

لك مطلق الحرية في إختيار الموضوعات التي تود تغطيتها أنت أو مؤسستك، فقد تفضل صنع تطبيقات تتيح البيانات للعامة، أو عمل رسوم بيانية أو تنظيم لقائات للتعريف بالبيانات المفتوحة، طالما كان ذلك في إطار فكرة اليوم

ونحن سنكون سعداء بمعاونتك إن كانت لديك إستفسارات وبنشر حصيلة إنتاجكم بعد إنتهاء اليوم

يمكنكم الإشتراك في الفعالية هنا

AlJazeera Hackathon (Canvas)

تنظم الجزيرة في قطر هاكاثون بنهاية شهر نوفمبر بهدف خلق تطبيقات تساهم في تطوير الإعلام. وبحسب موقع الهاكاثون، فسيتم الإعلان لاحقا عن المشاكل المطروح حلها من قبل المشاركين، إلا أنهم عرضوا نموذج لبعض المشاكل المقترح حلها، مثل عمل منصة بإستخلاص الأخبار المهمة من المناقشات التي تدور بين الناس، وهناك أيضا فكرة تحليل الأخبار التي تنشرها وتبثها الجزيرة بشكل إحصائي لمعرفة الأراء الممثلة أكثر من غيرها والأقليات التي يتم تجاهلها، بالإضافة لأفكار أخرى خاصة بتمثيل الأخبار عن طريق الرسوم البيانية والإنفوجرافيك

باب التقديم مفتوح للمطورين والمصممين والصحفيين حتى منتصف أكتوبر ويمكن للمهتمين التقدم عن طريق هذا الرابط، وبحسب الموقع، فإن تكاليف السفر والإقامة مغطاة و مجموع الجوائز المقدمة قيمتها خمسين ألف دولار أمريكي

“Open access publications are easy to access and theoretically accessible to anyone with an Internet connection”, Mark Muehlhaeusler

On the event’s homepage, the term Open Access is highlighted as it refers to “literature and research that is digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”. Nevertheless, Meggan Houlihan and Mark Muehlhaeusler felt the need to start by explaining the term in more details in the first session of the event.

In the next session, Nicholas Cop from SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), gave an introduction their bibliographic database of open access journals. SciELO initially started in Brazil, 15 years ago, yet it now have presence in 12 countries most of them are in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Mr. Cop also shed the light about the status of Open Access in that region by showing some statistics. For example, in Chile, 88% of the journals are Open Access ones. Similarly, in Brazil, 63% of the articles there are OA. On SciELO’s blog there is also a study about academic journal publication models in Brazil and Spain. SciELO is meant to make it easier for anyone to search in all the member OA journals from one place. They also noticed that the language barrier for researches done in Spanish or Portuguese are limiting the access to the papers published in the OA journals there, thus they translate the papers’ abstracts. Mr. Cop also spoke about a new project they are working on to promote OA books and to allow ways for easier citations between papers and e-books.

Later on, Iryna Kuchma of Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), spoke about 4 more projects and case studies. She started with EIFL, a not-for-profit organisation that works with libraries to enable access to digital information in developing and transition countries. Their Open Access program focuses on building capacity to launch open access repositories and to ensure their long-term sustainability, and empowering librarians and library professionals, scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates. She then introduced three other projects, OASPA, COAR and NDLTD.

The next session was a panel discussion that focused on the state of Open Access in the Arab world. The panel was moderated by Nadine Weheba and Ramy Aziz, and there were 5 panelists, Seif Abou Zeid from Tahrir Academy, Hala Essalmawi from Creative Commons Egypt, Ahmed Hussein from Open Egypt, Mandy Taha, an open access consultant, and yours truly from Open Knowledge Egypt. Seif spoke about their aim in Tahrir Academy to make university courses as well as other educational and skill sharing videos available to everyone for free. He emphasised on the importance of adopting an open license, such as Creative Commons, as opposed to many of the existing MOOC websites. Hala Essalmawi then moved to the legal aspects of OA, and how they worked in Creative Commons Egypt, not only to translate the license, but also to adapt it to the Egyptian laws. She also highlighted the positive and negative aspects of the Egyptian IP laws, and their relations to the OA goals. Since Open Egypt advocate for the use of Free and Open Source Software in Egypt, Ahmed Hussein went on to make analogies between Open Access and Open Source, how the culture of sharing and openness has helped the latter to develop in the recent years. He then called for building directories for OA journals in the region. Then, during my talk, I prefered to draw a picture about the status of OA in the region through some numbers. Then I highlighted the importance of OA, not only to make the access to research results costless, but also to make it more accessible. I used the language barrier as an example to show how the lack of free license may prevent people from translating existing researches published in foreign languages. I then had my share of analogies, by comparing OA to Open Data, and how openness here doesn’t stop at the legal aspects, but it also has to provide technical openness so that not only humans can read the published researches, but also machines for data analyses and search engines. There were discussions among the panelists and with the audience about the concepts discussed, and the case studies shown from the region. One of the discussions was taken home by Maha Bali after the session, where she continued the discussion on her blog.

Right before the final session of the day, Ramy Aziz of PLoS, showed how he encourages his students in Cairo University to blog about what they study. He also highlighted how Open Access and scientific blogging can fight pseudoscience and help researchers follow new studies in their fields. Then in the final session of the day, Ryder Kouba presented the AUC’s Digital Archive and Research (DAR).

I wasn’t able to attend the second day, but from the feedback on twitter, it was clear that the panel about copyright was interesting. Later in the day, Maha Bali had a session about Open Education Resources, and the session was followed by a workshop by Mark Muehlhaeusler on Open Journal System (OJS).

Bibliotheca Alexandrina and Creative Commons Egypt there are going to organize a Creative Commons event in the Library in Alexandria (BACC lecture hall) on Monday, the 5th of May. Prof. Michel Carol will join the event through a video conference from Washington DC, as he will talk about the birth of CC and how it took its way to the whole world. Dr. Melanie Dulong de Rosnay will talk about the adoption of CC in France, from legal and cultural aspects. Then Hala Essalmawi, among two others, will talk about CC in Egypt and the Arab world.

تنظم مؤسسة المعرفة المفتوحة مهرجانا سنوايا للمهتمين بالبيانات والمعرفة المفتوحة وحق الوصول للمعلومات والأبحاث العلمية والمواضيع المرتبطة بهذه المجالات، المهرجان، أو الملتقى، سيقام في برلين في يوليو القادم .. يمكنكم شراء التذاكر من هنا لحضور المؤتمر .. هناك أيضا فرص للتطوع في تنظيم المؤتمر، والمتطوعون سيحصلون على تذاكر مجانية، يمكنكم ملء هذه الإستمارة للتطوع، وبالنسبة لمصاريف السفر والإقامة، فهناك منح تقدم لمن يمتلك أفكارا جديدة تثري الملتقى بالإضافة لإستعداده للتطوع والمشاركة في التنظيم، الحصول على المنح من هذا الرابط

مؤسسة حرية الفكر والتعبير تشارك في يوم البيانات المفتوحة

تشارك المؤسسة في هذا اليوم، بإطلاق ورقة بحثية حول «المعرفة الحرة»، كما سيتم إنتاج فيديو إرشادي حول أهمية البيانات المفتوحة، هذا بالإضافة إلى نشر مجموعة من التغريدات والمنشورات على شبكات التواصل الاجتماعي للتعريف بأهمية البيانات المفتوحة. وتدعو مؤسسة حرية الفكر والتعبير جميع المهتمين بهذا الشأن، بالمشاركة في هذا اليوم بالكتابة عن البيانات المفتوحة، سواء بالتدوين أو غيره من الطرق المتاحة لنشر الأفكار

Ada Lovelace is often described as the world’s first computer programmer

One problem here, is that the current curriculum in the Egyptian schools doesn’t teach children how to code. Another problem is the digital divide between males and females. Even though a woman, Ada Lovelace, is considered to be the first computer programmer ever, surveys indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor’s degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11. To tackle those two problems, Rails Girls initiative was born in Finland. It is now a global non-profit volunteer community and they are going to run their first two day workshop for women in Egypt by the end of this month.

Rails Girls Cairo, 28th February – 1st March 2014

Ruby on Rails is an open source web development framework built using the Ruby programming language. Since released in 2004, Ruby on Rails played an influential role in the web development industry and remains to be seen as one of the most famous web development frameworks until today. It is used by Twitter, Github and Groupon (among many other famous companies). Participants in the Rails Girls two day workshop will learn sketching, prototyping, basic programming and get introduced to Ruby on Rails framework. The workshop is free and participants don’t need any previous knowledge about programming, all we ask them for is a laptop and some curiosity.

Dates: Friday February 28th – Saturday March 1st
Venue: JuiceLabs premises (14th Midan Masged Al Sahaba Sq., Off Mosaddak, Dokki, Giza)

Sign up for the event here.

اليوم العالمي للبيانات المفتوحة

بالنسبة لمصر فتوجد هنا بعض المقترحات لما يمكن أن تقومون به، ومرحبا بأي مقترحات جديدة، بمكنكم أيضا تنظبم ندوات في مدينتكم ودعوة المهتمين بمجال الشفافية والحكومات المفتوحة للحوار والتحدث .. وكما هو موضح في الرابط، فالنشاطات تسع أيضا كل من القانونببن والمبرمجين والمدونين والمترجمين، أو أي من المهتمين، كل في مجال خبرت

الهاش تاج الخاص بالفعالية موضح أدناه

#ODD2014

في إنتظار مشاركاتكم يوم السبت ٢٢ فبراير ٢٠١٤

وأحب أن تخبروني عن مشاركاتكم لأنوه عنها أيضا

Open Data Index provides first major assessment of state of open government data

In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses.

The UK and US top the 2013 Index, which is a result of community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.

Open Government Data initiatives have a critical impact on countries’ future development, especially in countries having long sufferred repressive regimes and inadequate economic development strategies. Open Data initiatives should focus on enabling access to information that helps improving peoples’ lives and the society at large. Citizens in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have demanded more open and inclusive governments as well as increased transparency and public engagement, pre-requierements for government accountability.

The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.

According to the World Bank, access to information and public engagement mechanisms in MENA are among the weakest in the world. This year’s Open Data Index is the first assessment of openness of fundamental government data in the region. The Index includes full scorecards for six countries (Israel, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen) while partial scorecards for Morocco and Lybia were for now removed.

Chloropleth map of Open Data Index scores. Darker colours reflect higher scores, whereas grey indicates an absence of data.

Rufus Pollock, Founder and CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation said:

Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health. There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from governments in the last few years, but this Index reveals that too much valuable information is still unavailable.

The UK and US are leaders on open government data but even they have room for improvement: the  US for example does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, while the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data.

There is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence, and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons – including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.

Less than half of the key datasets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to legally and technically use, reuse and redistribute data. This enables them to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.

The six countries from the Middle East, featured in the Index, globally show very low openness. Israel, Tunisia and Egypt rank among or close to the average-open countries. Bahrain and Yemen are among the 10 least open countries worldwide showcasing perfect enclosure of fundamental government data. Egypt’s data is often available online, but is rarely in a machine readable format and is never openly licensed (as per the Open Definition). Jordan, the only Mid-Eastern country having joined the Open Government Partnership, is unfortunately absent due to lack of contributors.

Proportion of countries in which each dataset is “open” according to the Open Definition (public, machine-readable, and openly licensed).

Pollock:

For the true benefits of open data to be realised, governments must do more than simply put a few spreadsheets online. The information should be easily found and understood, and should be able to be freely used, reused and shared by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.

CONTACT:

Open Knowledge Foundation on +44 (0)1223 422159 or index@okfn.org.
To see the full results: http://index.okfn.org.
For graphs of the data: https://index.okfn.org/visualisations.

CONTACT EGYPT:

Tarek Amr (@gr33ndata), Open Knowledge Foundation Egypt Ambassador | Rayna S, Open Data Index 2013 MENA Editor

NOTES FOR EDITORS

The Open Data Index is a community-based effort initiated and coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Index is compiled using contributions from civil society members and open data practitioners around the world, which are then peer-reviewed and checked by expert open data editors. The Index provides an independent assessment of openness in the following areas: transport timetables; government budget; government spending; election results; company registers; national map; national statistics; legislation; postcodes / ZIP codes; emissions of pollutants.

Countries assessed (in rank order): United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Australia, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, Iceland, Moldova, Bulgaria, Malta, Italy, France, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Israel, Czech Republic, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Croatia, Isle Of Man, Japan, Serbia, Russian Federation, Ecuador, South Korea, Poland, Taiwan R.O.C., China, Indonesia, Hungary, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Jersey, Guernsey, Slovak Republic, Bermuda, Romania, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Singapore, Lithuania, South Africa, Cayman Islands, Egypt, Nepal, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Gibraltar, Belgium, Hong Kong, Barbados, Bahamas, India, Bahrain, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Kenya, British Virgin Is.,  Saint Kitts & Nevis, Cyprus. NB: a number of countries were not assessed, often because they were not open enough to have an active civil society able or free to safely carry out the research.

Open Data is information which can be freely used, reused and shared by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. Truly open data demands a range of both technical and legal qualities which ensure that anyone can reuse it freely, for maximum benefit, and the Open Data Index assesses all of these. The Open Definition sets out the principles which define “openness” in relation to data and content.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is an international non-profit working to open up information around the world so it can be used to empower citizens and organizations to build fair and sustainable societies.

The annual summit for the Open Government Partnership will take place in London on 31st October to 1st November. More details at: http://www.opengovpartnership.org/

]]> http://eg.okfn.org/2013/10/open-data-index-2013-fundamental-public-sector-data-still-inavailable-in-mena/feed/ 4 31 http://eg.okfn.org/2013/10/garment-factory-data-expedition-summary/ http://eg.okfn.org/2013/10/garment-factory-data-expedition-summary/#respond Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:46:42 +0000 http://eg.okfn.org/?p=24 Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper offered their training centre for us to host our first Data Expedition in Cairo yesterday.

School of Data #OKFEgypt workshop by @gr33ndata @ Al-Masry Al-Youm Training Centre http://t.co/KM5NFrKvfq

— Muhammad Adel (@MuhammadAdel) October 19, 2013

The expedition lasted for 3 hours. We started by playing games in order to identify the different skillsets of the participants and introduce them to each other. Then we divided the 12 participants into 2 balanced teams. 

At a training about Data Journalism by @gr33ndata @ Al-Masry Al-Youm Training Centre http://t.co/PWSJX3Ms1g — Salma Hegab (@Salmats2al) October 19, 2013

After a quick presentation about the Open Knowledge Foundation, the School of Data and the Data Expeditions. We started to display some infographics from past expeditions, where participants were invited to criticise and comment on.

Each group was asked to come up with local topics that touch base with the main topic of Garment Factories.

Which chart to use for your data? http://t.co/U8RLGgEZGL — OKF Egypt (@OKFEgypt) October 19, 2013

Based on their sub-topics, or what we called Readers’ Questions, we started to discuss the possible data sources and graphical forms for representing our final outputs. Throughout this discussion, we also discussed how to choose the best graph for your data, as well as other issues related to data cleansing, data analysis and data sources credibility.

Finally, we agreed to collect and prepare the datasets for our topics throughout this week.

Had much fun today @OKFEgypt workshop by @gr33ndata. Was nice to meet @Lastoadri @Salmats2al @DoaaFarid @SaMoRaAli & more #OKFEgypt

— Muhammad Adel (@MuhammadAdel) October 19, 2013

Most of our discussions will take place in a mailing list created specifically for the event. People who couldn’t come to the session are also welcomed to join our discussions. After that, we shall start working on our final articles and visualisations.

OKF Egypt wish you a happy Eid

Happy Eid Al-Adha to all those who celebrate it. All best wishes to you and your families.

Data Expeditions are workshops where participants learn by doing. Using Garment Factories as a case-study, the participants will learn on the 19th of October how to gather, clean, analyse and visualise data. Working in teams, team-members will learn from the skills of each other. If you in Egypt and would like to participate this free workshop, please fill in this form [Ar].

ورش إستكشاف البيانات هي ورش يتعلم فيها المشاركون عن طريق المشاركة والإنخراط في الموضوع بأيديهم. بإستخدام البيانات الخاصة بمصانع الأنسجة والملابس، سيتعلم المشاركون في التاسع عشر من أكتوبر كيفية جمع وتنسيق وتحليل ورسم البيانات. أعضاء كل فريق سيتعلمون من بعضهم البعض مهارات جديدة. إن كنت في مصر وتود المشاركة، يرجى التسجيل هنا

الحضور بأولوية الحجز