Data Academy Datathon

Involving data training, tools, networks and the public for fairer Balkan public life

The project

Data Academy project draws from the recent developments in the field of the open government, taking into account the needs of civil society. From international and regional data specialists we will learn how to manage data. Part of the process will be working with local programmers to build new data tools and deliver a set of regionally relevant best practices and code-sets which may, with some tweaking, be employed in any country across the Balkans.

Trainings in BiH, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia

As a part of the project, in March-April 2015 in each of the project countries a 3-days training is taking place. In the form of workshops activist are getting the chance to work on a problem that can be solved with using public data. Each country can chose their own topic and together with trainers from the region work on solving the problem using appropriate methods of working with data. Each group gets also basic information about working with data for civic projects. Every group is also invited to take part in POINT conference data-thon (a 2 days working with data event), where together with skilled programmers, the activists will develop the projects from the workshop.

Data-thon

As part of the POINT, participants from Data Academy trainings will get a chance to work on their data-products. Other participants of the conference including international data experts and practitioners will be invited to help them in building data-stories, technical infrastructure for sharing data (like APIs), whereas everybody can join in manual data cleaning, where it is unavoidable. During the weekend of May, 23-24, everybody will join hands in order to create visualizations, infographics, data-stories and open-data databases from data scraped from the public institutions websites. Please read Data Academy blog to follow the developments from the 4 countries taking part in the project.

The network

The project is conducted by ACTION SEE network (Accountability, Technology and Institutional Openness Network in South-East Europe) composed by UG Zasto Ne from BiH, CRTA from Serbia, Metamorphosis Foundation from Macedonia and Center for Democratic Transition from Montenegro in partnership with Techsoup Europe. Among other regional projects we have collaborated on the truth-o-meter project, annual POINT conferences and most recently with TechSoup Europe’s www.communityboostr.org program. Data Academy project along with the data-thon is supported by the US Embassy in Sarajevo. The project starts in August 2014 and will last till May 2015.