My Data Mural work has led me into a new area - actually helping community groups find the stories they want to tell in their raw data.  Until now, all my data therapy work has focused on how to present the data-driven stories more creatively.  This post shares some of the techniques I'm trying out.

This is the second in a series of posts about how technology can help food rescue and food security.  I am collaborating with community groups in Somerville, MA; trying to extend and enhance existing food rescue programs. Click here to read the first, a tech overview.

Data visualization is all over the place. On the hype curve, we’re clearly up in the area of inflated expectations. If you listen to the reporting, you wouldn't be blamed for thinking dataviz is going to bring world peace! I’m writing to beat the drum in favor of more informal presentations.  You can tell better data stories, and engage your audience more, by creating less formal data presentations.

Some Examples

What do I mean by "informal visualization"?  To start, toss out your computer, printer and graph paper. Pull our your crayons, big paper, tape, and your imagination.

From top-left, clockwise: 

This is the first in a series of posts about how technology can help food rescue and food security.  I am collaborating with community groups in Somerville, MA; trying to extend and enhance existing food rescue programs.  Read the second post, about our design workshop, here.

Food waste is a huge problem in the US – with millions of tons wasted per year and scores left hungry around the nation. Members of the Somerville Coalition for Food Security approached me to help work on this problem here in my town; wondering how technology could help them expand their exiting food recovery programs. As a first step, I did a bunch of research into who is using technology to help with food rescue, and how. This post summarizes that research.

Parks are awesome, but does your city have enough of them? The Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore(tm) tries to asses this with a simple score out of 100. I’m seeing this kind of “civic index” more and more often. The biggest example I see if WalkScore, which has become omnipresent on real estate websites (much to my pleasure). Both are civic indexes that serve as proxies for complicated algorithms, but while TPL is definitely talking to planners, WalkScore is talking directly to regular folks.

We were lucky to host two organizers of the HONK! Festival ofActivist Street Bands - John Bell and Reebee Garofolo. These collaborative livenotes were authored by myself, Denise Cheng, Nathan Matias, Matt Stempeck, and a few others I think.

Rahul introduced HONK! fest, which is an annual gathering of activist street bands that descends on Somerville, MA. It began seven years ago. Today’s speakers will explore what it means to take back the public space. One of the things about parading is that it’s breaking a lot of rules—you’re not allowed to walk down the streets, make so much noise in normal circumstances—and it’s fun!

As you might have seen in my short talk earlier this year, I'm excited about taking Data Therapy in a more artistic direction. Towards this goal, my collaborator/wife Emily and I just facilitated a tiny Data Mural pilot at the Doctors for Global Health General Assembly. The idea of a Data Mural is to work with a community group to collaboratively tell a data story in visual form. Our primary goal for this pilot was to test out some of our facilitation techniques. I'm writing this blog post to share lessons from this pilot, and to get you excited about the idea! Email me if you have a Data Mural project in mind.

I'll start off by sharing the final mural. The participants liked it so much that they are taking it to display at a protest in New York City next month! Here are some more pictures.

Live notes from the "Collaboration, not Calcification" session at the Awesome Summit, by Ellen Chisa, Nikki Lee, and Rahul Bhargava.

Last session! Thanks guys for sticking around. We're going to talk about collaboration, and do-away with the slides.

Panelists

Live notes from the "Age of Peak Guilt" session at the Awesome Summit, by Rahul Bhargava, Matt Stempeck, Ellen Chisa, and Willow Brugh.

Alexis Ohanian introduces the panel by explaining the problem. Currently, to do well we ask for money by showing a sad kid. This poverty porn just causes us to feel guilty. Have we reached the peak? What else can we do instead. The panelists all have experiences with using positive experiences to cause good.

Zach Walker - DonorsChoose.org"

Most people in the room are aware of Donor's Choose. While it's older than Kickstarter, it's frequently responded as "Kickstarter for Public Schools n America." Teachers can post projects they'd like to do in their classrooms, but that they don't have funding for. People around the world can contribute to fund their projects.A few examples:

Live notes from the "Giving More Than Money" session at the Awesome Summit, by Rahul Bhargava, Ethan Zuckerman and Willow Brugh.

Matt Stempeck (@mstem) comes to the Center for Civic Media from the Washington activism world. The organizations he worked with always lacked money. When it became time to run a campaign, organizations always wanted to figure out what to ask for... and the obvious question is to ask for money. But people don't like to be asked for money. Now, more people do their jobs over the Internet - can we structure organizations so we can benefit from people's skills, not just from their ability to write checks.