Newsletter #4: Floss And Labour

Newsletter #4: sent!
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Work-wise: joining a great line-up of speakers in a webinar on financial transparency, getting articles cross-posted far and wide, implementing policies in real life and working on a multitude of projects I can’t say more about just yet. So stay tuned!

Links-wise: how offense discourse traps us into inaction, a broken Congress, the radical political history of the photocopier, a new flossing technique and Queen Latifah.

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Newsletter #3: In Your Shoes

Newsletter #3: sent!
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Work-wise: writing about how to design a financial transparency strategy with a role-playing game, being honoured to have articles I wrote cross-posted and more widely engaged with and having excellent conversations about tech capacity building, responsible data and participatory research which will feed upcoming write-ups – stay tuned!

Links-wise: labor pains and workers’ rights, institutional harassment, the fabulous Ruth Bader Ginsburg, how to be a pregnant butch, body hair, Beyoncé.

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How to design a financial transparency strategy with a role-playing game

Screen Shot 2015-02-12 at 6.59.19 PMFrom Transparency International‘s Financial Jargon Buster: Illicit Financial Flows.

Grateful thanks to Lucy Chambers for the thoughtful feedback provided on this post.

When we talk about financial transparency, numbers and data are understandably what first comes to mind. But are the platforms and portals collecting all that, the real starting point of our work? And how can we make sure that a particular technology which proved successful for a project whose execution we admire, would actually fit the ecosystem we’re working with?

Sounds like our starting point before kicking off any project should actually be much more lo-fi and hands-on: an offline analysis combining our learnings from the most remarkable case studies with a well-tailored and flexible understanding of the context we’re working with.

The interest in exploring a possible answer to this need got Jean Brice Tetka (Transparency International), Jay Bhalla (Open Institute) and me together in a breakout session during the recent Follow The Money workshop.

Continue reading How to design a financial transparency strategy with a role-playing game

Newsletter #2: Money Moving

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Work-wise: notes from the Follow The Money workshop, co-facilitating work on technology for/ and financial transparency, and upcoming developments powered by the post on responsible data storytelling published on this very blog.

Links-wise: privilege and lack of thereof, racist encounters at the opera, queering the beauty industry, no revolution without reflection, Sleater Kinney, blackness and female mustache.

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Newsletter #1: First Things First

Newsletter #1: sent!
(and archived if you missed it)

Work-wise: notes from the the 2014 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, the start of a collective conversation on responsible data storytelling, and outcome stories from the Community Building track co-curated at Mozilla Festival.

Links-wise: a new civil rights movement, algorithms, feminism, domestic worker workforce, fierce music, weaponized theater. And more.

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On data storytelling – and how to make it responsibly

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 presetPicture from the Responsible Data Storytelling session, by Beatrice Martini (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Thanks to Nasma Ahmed, Renee Black and Sarah Moncelle for collaborating on editing this blogpost.

Stories are a key element of knowledge, and as such fuel evidence and empowerment. They can help communicate problems and challenges we might not have experienced personally, but that are key to be aware of in order to inform our understanding and agency as active members of our societies.

A compelling way to tell stories is through data. Presented as numbers, percentages and visualisations, data can transmit a message directly and sharply, often also helping going beyond misunderstandings caused by language or tone unclarity in our communication.

But are all data good (as in “not harmful”)? Is “the more the merrier” the most helpful way to work with them? Spoiler alert: no, and no.

Continue reading On data storytelling – and how to make it responsibly