UReport Uganda is an initiative to do SMS-based polling among a large number of Ugandan citizens on different topics weekly. The service boasts an impressive subscriber base of over 2,50,000 people as of Oct 2014. While the base is large, the poll data on the website indicates that SMS polls are sent to a smaller subset of participants each week with responses ranging from 20-50% in the polls I reviewed. The website provides a word cloud on the basis of responses and it also provides charts in case the question of the week had multiple choice responses. Samples of text […]
Data journalism
Witness is an organization dedicated to promoting the effective use of videos for human rights. The organization trains people to use videos, protect the content and the people in it – and also build effective campaigns to prevent human rights abuses. Witness was created after a video surfaced on the police brutality against Rodney King that made the founders recognize the power of videos in such situations. Apart from trainings, they also create apps and engage in policy advocacy with large internet companies to create a safe space for human rights activists working in dangerous conditions. Their blog is also an interesting space for articles on the […]
The Overview Project: “Overview is an open-source tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data, by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or Freedom of Information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read. There are good tools for searching within large document sets for names and keywords, but that doesn