Ghana’s First Data Journalism Boot Camp

The World Bank in partnership with Google, African News Innovation Challenge, Open knowledge foundation, Web foundation, Upande, The Guardian and NITA, organized the first data journalism boot camp from 24th – 26th October 2012 for Journalist, Civil Service Organizations and Developers in Ghana. Participants came together to work in teams to build data-driven apps and civic engagement websites using readily available technologies.

The event brought to light the fact that citizen journalism is rapidly eliminating legacy media and that the media landscape in Ghana is about to experience a major transformation due to this revolution. Mobile phones have become the tool people are using to tell stories and share information as and when it happens.The boot camp was therefore necessary to introduce journalist and developers in Ghana to new and innovative ways of finding, creating and reporting stories.

Participants were introduced to tools such as excel, google refine and google fusion. By the end of the boot camp participants  learnt how to extract, clean,  analyse and visualize public data, using these powerful forensic tools and to tell better informed stories.

Participants were also grouped into various teams and expected to create apps or civic utility websites based on what they had learnt.Most of the projects developed were interesting and proved that the boot camp was indeed a successful one.

There was a $3000 award to be shared by the best projects. The best project was on the Extractive Industry which received a $1500 award as seed grant to be used in further development of the project.  View photos from the boot camp