Lessons in community from community managers #12: Lorna Mitchell

Leave a reply

It’s been a while since the last in the community management series. In this latest post Lorna Mitchell gives her 3 tips. Lorna is co-project lead for http://joind.in – an open source development project for gathering event feedback. She says “The other project lead is Chris Cornutt, a guy I’ve met three times over three years, who lives in a timezone 6 hours out from mine.”

Lorna worked as a telecommuter for a number of years and did community relations in that role, and was involved in running PHPWomen, a global user group bringing together women programming PHP, “with all the cultural and linguistic variations that brings.”

Lorna’s tips are:

Keep communicating

A running commentary of what you are doing and thinking is essential when you are working with people who can’t see you and may not have met you.

Communicate appropriately

Don’t hold a discussion over Twitter that would be better in long hand over email. Make a phone call rather than having days of comment and response on a bug tracker.

Be inclusive

Nothing turns newcomers off faster than lots of in-jokes or references to people they don’t know or places they didn’t go.

Mapping the budget cuts

1 Reply

budget cuts map

Richard Pope and Jordan Hatch have been building a very useful site tracking recent budget cuts, building up to this week’s spending review.

Where Are The Cuts? uses the code behind the open source Ushahidi platform (covered previously on OJB by Claire Wardle) to present a map of the UK representing where cuts are being felt. Users can submit their own reports of cuts, or add details to others via a comments box.

It’s early days in the project – currently many of the cuts are to national organisations with local-level impacts yet to be dug out.

Closely involved is the public expenditure-tracking site Where Does My Money Go? which has compiled a lot of relevant data.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham a couple of my MA Online Journalism students have set up a hyperlocal blog for the 50,000 public sector workers in the region, primarily to report those budget cuts and how they are affecting people. Andy Watt, who – along with Hedy Korbee – is behind the site, has blogged about the preparation for the site’s launch here. It’s a good example of how journalists can react to a major issue with a niche blog. Andy and Hedy will be working with the local newspapers to combine expertise.

Hyperlocal voices: Bart Brouwers, Telegraaf hyperlocal project, Netherlands

6 Replies

Bart Brouwers has been overseeing the establishment of a whole group of hyperlocal sites in the Netherlands with the Telegraaf Media Group. As part of the Hyperlocal Voices series, he explains the background to the project and what they’ve learned so far. Two presentations on the project can be seen above.

Who were the people behind the blog, and what were their backgrounds?

About a year ago, I came up with the plan for a hyperlocal, hyperpersonal news and data network covering all of the Netherlands. My dream was to give every single Dutchman (we have 16 million & counting…) his own platform for local relevance.

I wanted to roll it out myself and in order to get it financed I made contact with the board of directors of the Telegraaf Media Groep. I already worked for them (as the editor-in-chief of national free newspaper Sp!ts and before that as the editor-in-chief of regional newspaper Dagblad De Limburger), so it felt kind of natural to tell and ask them before I would pitch my idea somewhere else.

What I didn’t know is that TMG was already working on a hyperlocal platform, so after a few talks we decided to combine both plans. So instead of quitting TMG and starting my own company, I’m still an employee.

What made you decide to set up the blogs?

I was convinced local relevance would/will be a strong force in media. The combination of local business and local information (news, data) could easily become the trigger for a fine enterprise. Continue reading →

Hyperlocal voices: Warren Free, Tamworth Blog

1 Reply

Hyperlocal blog: Tamworth Blog

In the latest in the hyperlocal voices series, Tamworth Blog‘s Warren Free talks about how the same frustration with lack of timely local coverage – and the example set by the nearby Lichfield Blog – led him to start publishing last year.

Who were the people behind the blog, and what were their backgrounds?

I started up the blog after seeing what was happening around the Midlands, primarily in Lichfield and saw the concept would give us something in Tamworth where we could communicate the news as it happened. At the time I was working from home, so in Tamworth the majority of the time.

My background though isn’t one which is littered with journalism experience. My only brush with journalism was during my GCSE’s where I studied Media Studies: we took part in a national newspaper competition, where we came in the top 20. That’s kind of where I left it, until Tamworth Blog was set up in 2009.

What made you decide to set up the blog?

I saw what was happening in Lichfield and suffered the same frustration: local news in Tamworth wasn’t accessible unless you purchased the weekly newspaper. Great if you wanted to find out what happened on Saturday a week later. So I endeavoured to try to provide this service to people in Tamworth. Continue reading →

Manchester police tweets – live data visualisation by the MEN

Leave a reply

Manchester police tweets - live data visualisation

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) have been experimenting today with tweeting every incident they deal with. The novelty value of the initiative has been widely reported – but local newspaper the Manchester Evening News has taken the opportunity to ask some deeper questions of the data generated by experimenting with data visualisation.

A series of bar charts – generated from Google spreadsheets and updated throughout the day – provide a valuable – and instant – insight into the sort of work that police are having to deal with.

In particular, the newspaper is testing the police’s claim that they spend a great deal of time dealing with “social work” as well as crime. At the time of writing, it certainly does take up a significant proportion – although not the “two-thirds” mentioned by GMP chief Peter Fahy. (Statistical disclaimer: the data does not yet even represent 24 hours, so is not yet going to be a useful guide. Fahy’s statistics may be more reliable).

Also visualised are the areas responsible for the most calls, the social-crime breakdown of incidents by area, and breakdowns of social incidents and serious crime incidents by type.

I’m not sure how much time they had to prepare for this, but it’s a good quick hack.

That said, the visualisation could be improved: 3D bars are never a good idea, for instance, and the divisional breakdown showing serious crime versus “social work” is difficult to visually interpret (percentages of the whole would be more easy to directly compare). The breakdowns of serious crimes and “social work”, meanwhile, should be ranked from most popular down with labelling used rather than colour.

Head of Online Content Paul Gallagher says that it’s currently a manual exercise that requires a page refresh to see updated visuals. But he thinks “the real benefit of this will come afterwards when we can also plot the data over time”. Impressively, the newspaper plans to publish the raw data and will be bringing it to tomorrow’s Hacks and Hackers Hackday in Manchester.

More broadly, the MEN is to be commended for spotting this more substantial angle to what could easily be dismissed as a gimmick by the GMP. Although that doesn’t stop me enjoying the headlines in coverage elsewhere (shown below).

UPDATE: The data is also visualised as a word cloud and line chart at Data Driven.

Manchester police twitter headlines

Stories hidden in the data, stories in the comments

1 Reply

the tax gap

My attention was drawn this week by David Hayward to a visualisation by David McCandless of the tax gap (click on image for larger version). McCandless does some beautiful stuff, but what was particularly interesting in this graphic was how it highlighted areas that rarely make the news agenda.

Tax avoidance and evasion, for example, account for £7.4bn each, while benefit fraud and benefit system error account for £1.5 and £1.6bn respectively.

Yet while the latter dominate the news agenda, and benefit cheats subject to regular exposure, tax avoidance and evasion are rare guests on the pages of newspapers.

In other words, the data is identifying a news hole of sorts. There are many reasons for this – Galtung & Ruge would have plenty of ideas, for example – but still: there it is.

The comments

But that’s only part of what makes this so interesting. By publishing the data and having built the healthy community that exists around the data blog, McCandless and The Guardian benefit from some very useful comments (aside from the odd political one) on how to improve both the data and the visualisation.

This is a great example of how the newspaper is stealing an enormous march on its rivals in working beyond its newsroom in collaboration with users – benefiting from what Clay Shirky would call cognitive surplus. Data is not just an informational object, but a social one too.

Statistical analysis as journalism – Benford’s law

Leave a reply

 

drug-related murder map

I’m always on the lookout for practical applications of statistical analysis for doing journalism, so this piece of work by Diego Valle-Jones, on drug-related murders, made me very happy.

I’ve heard of the first-digit law (also known as Benford’s law) before – it’s a way of spotting dodgy data.

What Diego Valle-Jones has done is use the method to highlight discrepancies in information on drug-delated murders in Mexico. Or, as Pete Warden explains:

“With the help of just Benford’s law and data sets to compare he’s able to demonstrate how the police are systematically hiding over a thousand murders a year in a single state, and that’s just in one small part of the article.”

Diego takes up the story:

“The police records and the vital statistics records are collected using different methodologies: vital statistics from the INEGI [the statistical agency of the Mexican government] are collected from death certificates and the police records from the SNSP are the number of police reports (“averiguaciones previas”) for the crime of murder—not the number of victims. For example, if there happened to occur a particular heinous crime in which 15 teens were massacred, but only one police report were filed, all the murders would be recorded in the database as one. But even taking this into account, the difference is too high.

“You could also argue that the data are provisional—at least for 2008—but missing over a thousand murders in Chihuahua makes the data useless at the state level. I could understand it if it was an undercount by 10%–15%, or if they had added a disclaimer saying the data for Chihuahua was from July, but none of that happened and it just looks like a clumsy way to lie. It’s a pity several media outlets and the UN homicide statistics used this data to report the homicide rate in Mexico is lower than it really is.”

But what brings the data alive is Diego’s knowledge of the issue. In one passage he checks against large massacres since 1994 to see if they were recorded in the database. One of them – the Acteal Massacre (“45 dead, December 22, 1997″) – is not there. This, he says, was “committed by paramilitary units with government backing against 45 Tzotzil Indians … According to the INEGI there were only 2 deaths during December 1997 in the municipality of Chenalho, where the massacre occurred. What a silly way to avoid recording homicides! Now it is just a question of which data is less corrupt.”

The post as a whole is well worth reading in full, both as a fascinating piece of journalism, and a fascinating use of a range of statistical methods. As Pete says, it is a wonder this guy doesn’t get more publicity for his work.

Statistical analysis as journalism – Benford's law

6 Replies

drug-related murder map

I’m always on the lookout for practical applications of statistical analysis for doing journalism, so this piece of work by Diego Valle-Jones, on drug-related murders, made me very happy.

I’ve heard of the first-digit law (also known as Benford’s law) before – it’s a way of spotting dodgy data.

What Diego Valle-Jones has done is use the method to highlight discrepancies in information on drug-delated murders in Mexico. Or, as Pete Warden explains:

“With the help of just Benford’s law and data sets to compare he’s able to demonstrate how the police are systematically hiding over a thousand murders a year in a single state, and that’s just in one small part of the article.”

Diego takes up the story:

“The police records and the vital statistics records are collected using different methodologies: vital statistics from the INEGI [the statistical agency of the Mexican government] are collected from death certificates and the police records from the SNSP are the number of police reports (“averiguaciones previas”) for the crime of murder—not the number of victims. For example, if there happened to occur a particular heinous crime in which 15 teens were massacred, but only one police report were filed, all the murders would be recorded in the database as one. But even taking this into account, the difference is too high.

“You could also argue that the data are provisional—at least for 2008—but missing over a thousand murders in Chihuahua makes the data useless at the state level. I could understand it if it was an undercount by 10%–15%, or if they had added a disclaimer saying the data for Chihuahua was from July, but none of that happened and it just looks like a clumsy way to lie. It’s a pity several media outlets and the UN homicide statistics used this data to report the homicide rate in Mexico is lower than it really is.”

But what brings the data alive is Diego’s knowledge of the issue. In one passage he checks against large massacres since 1994 to see if they were recorded in the database. One of them – the Acteal Massacre (“45 dead, December 22, 1997”) – is not there. This, he says, was “committed by paramilitary units with government backing against 45 Tzotzil Indians … According to the INEGI there were only 2 deaths during December 1997 in the municipality of Chenalho, where the massacre occurred. What a silly way to avoid recording homicides! Now it is just a question of which data is less corrupt.”

The post as a whole is well worth reading in full, both as a fascinating piece of journalism, and a fascinating use of a range of statistical methods. As Pete says, it is a wonder this guy doesn’t get more publicity for his work.

Andrew Marr fails to learn from his own history

6 Replies

“It is frightful that someone who is no one… can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility & with the aid of this dreadful disproportioned means of communication”

That’s not a quote from Andrew Marr, but Soren Kierkegaard writing about newspapers in the 19th century. Here’s another:

“I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters.  But TV news can only present the “bare bones” of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring”

Strange that the author of one of the best histories of British journalism can fail to remember how each new platform for journalism has been greeted, and how fuzzy the concept of journalism is.

“Journalism includes drunks and dyslexics and some of the least trustworthy, wickedest people in the land … The reader doesn’t know who pretends to make the necessary phone calls, but never bothers; or that this one hates Tories and always writes them down.”

That’s a quote from Andrew Marr’s book. Here’s another:

“In a complicated, developed society, much of the most important finding out can only be done by people with narrower, sharper skills – microbiologists, meteorologists, opinion pollsters and market analysts, whose discoveries journalism simply passes on in a more popular (and generally distorted) form.”

Sounds like bloggers to me.

Marr doesn’t even need to look very far back. This fake-debate was laid to rest years ago (is anyone really claiming that citizen journalism will entirely replace professional journalism? Or still trying to compare blogging – a technical process – with journalism – a cultural construct?). As I tweeted yesterday: the year 2005 called, Andrew. They want their prejudices back.

Meanwhile, Channel 4 journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy has written eloquently in defence of bloggers and the need to engage through social media.

Revisiting Rodolfo Walsh, father of Argentinian non fiction

Leave a reply

For Argentinians like me, it was Rodolfo Walsh – and not Truman Capote, who published In Cold Blood almost a decade later – that invented non fiction journalism with his famous 1957 book Operación Masacre, a masterpiece of investigative journalism.

Twenty years later, on the first anniversary of Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship, he was intercepted by soldiers, murdered, and his remains vanished: he became a “desaparecido”, just after delivering his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta (Carta Abierta de un Escritor a la Junta Militar) to Argentine newspapers and correspondents at foreign media organizations.

OperacionMasacreBook

To commemorate his work, Alvaro Liuzzi is starting a “journalistic experiment” called Proyecto Walsh searching for an answer to an interesting question: “What would have happened if, for the research of Operacion Masacre, Rodolfo Walsh had had access to the digital tools we have today?”.

The Twitter user @rodolfowalsh is the first step of Proyecto Walsh that will try to create an digital ecosystem in order to gather all of the research that Rodolfo accomplished 54 years ago, and remix it using the  journalistic tools of today.