On Nov 28th and 29th we did a data journalism workshop with The Hoot and the Oorvani Foundation.

We had 20 writers from different organizations come to learn about data. Including a few journalists and citizen journalists we decided to do a background on data journalism.

Then we did a data familiarity session to understand where people’s levels were.  While we did a registration form and asked specific questions about what people’s comfort with data were we wanted to make people had basic understanding of data.

The group we had was particularly new to data so we had spent a good amount of time on the basics of excel and data cleanup.

When we were ready to start exploring the dataset we used basic graphs in excel and moved toward other tools like Data Wrapper.

The 2nd day we did more with Fusion Tables and Maps. So people had a basic understanding of how to use those types of tools.

Learnings:

This was our first workshop with a crowd of mostly beginners so we spent a good amount of time on how to use tables. One participant didn’t know excel was available on their computer and had never opened the program before.  By the end she could do basic analysis and data cleanup. So we considered this to be our most accessible and productive workshop yet.