Journo Storyhack
You want to shed light on international trade and money transfer? You need a quick and interactive overview of who are the major import and export countries of a selected country? You want to know where development aid has been spent and how it was used? Answers can be find in using and visualising data on our platform. This is why DW organised two Storyhacks for journalists and other storytellers.
The Storyhacks took place in December 2017 (Bonn) and in the first month of 2018 (Berlin) and brought together people with different skill sets: data experts, journalists, developer, and community activists. On both occasions the participants used a full day getting acquainted with the platform, finding an interesting story and producing it. And – of course – to test and challenge the two dashboards – Trade Activities and Development Assistance – which are both part of the overall YDS platform.
The goal of the Storyhacks was to a) let the participants – who had very little knowledge about Zimbabwe – find out more about the country based on data, and b) find interesting, ivestigative stories to write about.
Read here the article which has been produced and published:
How Mugabe’s business policies have impacted Zimbabwean trade
What did the participants found out?
Participants @DW Storyhack
The YDS platform enables user to easily access and interact with the public data and helps in finding patterns and identifying potential topics and stories. Although, all participants identified that even more detailed data would have provided stronger stories. Since all of them live in Germany, there would have liked to get more information about the relation between Zimbabwe and Germany. Hence, one requirement was to be able the enricht the platform with more data. YourDataStories can provide that. The platform was enriched by Serbian data in order to support a journalist on the spot.
You want to use the the dashboard Official Trade Activities Assistance? Try it out here. Also check out the dashboard Official Development Assistance.
The two Storyhacks “Storytelling based on Open Data” were organised by Deutsche Welle Innovation Projects.
About the author : Tilman Wagner (DW)
