Presentacion de LA NACION DATA en Strata Conference, Santa Clara, California 2013

1. How to promote data journalism in
a country without open data
Angélica Peralta Ramos
www.lanacion.com.ar/data

2. Transparency?
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2012/r Argentina: 102 score 35
esults

3. Not law,
but decree
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1857498
David Banisar, FOIA Expert. October 2012

4. Data.gov Portals?
In 2012 – Buenos Aires
City and Misiones
Province opened data
portals

5. A vision for several actions
What?
LA NACION decided to challenge status quo and
started opening data and developing data
journalism

6. Why?
- Data is a new raw material for journalism
- Move public data closer to the people
- Activate demand of public data
- Discover new stories hidden in datasets
- Allow citizen´s collaboration + innovate

7. How?
a. Gathering and building datasets from scratch.
b. Free tools for opening and visualizing data, and
reusing data shared by others (eg. Guardian)
c. Data presence in www.lanacion.com
- home page section in main navigation bar (LNDATA)
- TAG that integrates stories with open data or dataviz
- @LNdata Twitter & Facebook
- Open Data Catalog
- Blog NATION DATA
- DATAFEST

8. Tools

9. Reuse DATA: The Guardian Data store

10. LEARN AND COLLABORATE
http://www.datajournalismhandbook.com

11. Data projects: Subsidies, Inflation,
Senate Expenses…

12. CASE #1
SUBSIDIES for the BUS TRANSPORTATION
SERVICES

13. Transport Agency – Capture (Web site)
Bus Companies
. (Cash)
Gasoil

14. Transport Agency – Processing
CCP Subsidy corresponding to March 2012
ccp_sistau_marzo12(6).xlsx (Subsidio
CCP)
BUT: 1.200 Rows (Companies)
21 Columns
1.600 PDF files (subsidies CASH y Gasoil for Buses and Trains) from 2003 to now (March
2013).
)

15. Transport Secretary – Analysis
Monthly consolidation for 3 subsidies for each company, and geographic zone
Subsidies paid in 2010  USD 4.260.000 ….. per day

16. Total SISTAU-GASOIL.XLS
~187.000 records

18. Transportation Regulatory Agency (CNRT) – Capture
Buses registered by each company, according to
the Public Transport Regulation Agency (CNRT)
and its vehicle plates (monthly basis). 
Number of vehicles

21. CASE #2
INFLATION in ARGENTINA
How to show (with data)
what you can’t tell?

24. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/argentina-becomes-first-nation-
censured-by-imf-on-inflation-data.html

26. ADELCO (Consumer Association)
Monthly registration, since 2006, of the same 28 products, untill September 2012
2 Baskets of product prices index

27. ADELCO (Consumer Association)

29. http://data.lanacion.com.ar/dashboards/5068/inflacion-y-precios/

30. CASE #3
SENATE EXPENSES

32. Challenge: STRUCTURE
THE UNSTRUCTURED
DATA

35. DATAFEST
Opening & Mining Public Data

36. • Besides daily efforts, we opened 21 datasets and made “Dataset cheat sheets”
to make them accessible and ready for analysis with data mining techniques or
data visualization in our first DATAFEST in Argentina last November.
• This DATAFEST was organized by LA NACION and UNIVERSIDAD AUSTRAL
Masters Degree in Data Mining and Universidad Austral Communications
Faculty.

37. DATAFEST Coach !!

39. DataSets inventory and their “cheat sheets”

40. Cheat Sheet : Subsidies for the Public Bus Transport System – Cleaned ,
normalized and open DATA

41. Key factors
Key Factors:
Team work, training, use free tools, never stop
learning, work by projects, daily data awareness,
be proactive in hackathons, be open to
international support: Knight- ICFJ Fellowship, Knight
Mozilla Opennews Partner, Knight Foundation Datafest
support.

42. Technology Challenges
• Manage multiple sources and formats
• Automate process to bring data daily to readers & journalism
in open formats
• Structure the unstructured data
• Connect the dots

43. Human Challenges:
- Engage more journalists and data scientists
and the developers community.
- Develop a platform that allows citizens
collaboration
- Inspire and help other media and
organizations to open data for Argentina and
spread the word

44. VIDEO
http://youtu.be/ZelT_UrisQk

45. Thanks…
@momiperalta
@LNdata