Black smoke churned toward the sky in
Nyanga, one of the oldest townships in Cape Town, after protestors set fire to buses there in early September. Across the
country, in Soweto near Johannesburg, a group of citizens--most of them
children--face off against police over housing issues.
A police report shows that violent protests have doubled in
the country, while an academic report reveals that the number of people killed
in insurrections has increased sharply. Protests are an ongoing feature of life
in South Africa, but news reports on this frequent occurrence are largely
superficial.
They deal with descriptions of running battles with police, deaths
and injury statistics. Journalists rarely delve more deeply into the reasons
why communities engage in these violent protests.
That’s because journalism skills have
been decimated as the ranks of newsroom reporters decline sharply in the
country, according to William Bird, Director of Media Monitoring
Africa (MMA). “Given the lack of resources, news is focused on big
political personalities, and issues aren’t being unpacked,” he told IJNet in an
interview. “When it comes to service delivery protests, context is given
shorthand, so there’s been very little depth to the reporting on this issue.”
MMA, a winner in the African News Innovation
Contest organized by the African Media Initiative (AMI), was preparing for the
elections during the first quarter of 2014, which meant looking for ways that
the nonprofit organization could support journalists limited by tight
resources. “We were looking for a way that journalists could easily add a lot
of data and depth to their stories by making this information accessible and
easy to use,” he said.
“We wanted to mash the election results
with census results and other data so that journalists could have easy access
to information about basic services, income levels, service levels, and other
key information that would offer real insight into why people protest and what
they’re protesting about,” he said.
That was easier said than done, since
much of South Africa’s publicly available data sits trapped in lengthy reports,
in inaccessible formats that do little to help journalists keep the electorate
informed on civic matters that directly affect them.
That’s why Bird turned to Code for South Africa, a
nonprofit that builds a more active citizenry by promoting the availability of
data. Code for South Africa was established with a grant from the African Media
Initiative's Code for Africa program.
Code for South Africa knew that a tool
like the one Bird was envisioning was already in development, but for a
different country. The Knight News Challenge-funded Census Reporter project
was pulling data from the U.S. census and putting it into a simple and
easy-to-use interface that includes data visualizations. The goal: to build a
journalist-friendly tool that would offer rich, deep context at a glance.
Census Reporter was built completely
using open source software which meant that Code for South Africa could use the
platform’s underlying code at no cost, and build on top of it, in order to
adapt the tool so that it could be used for South African state datasets.
The result: Code for South Africa lead
technologist Greg Kempe led a team that built WaziMap.co.za, which launched in May 2014. Wazi is the
local isiZulu word for “knowledge,” and means “open” in East Africa’s kiSwahili
language.
The African version of the platform
included a streamlined data backend that matches the data interface (called an
application programme interface, or API) of the CensusReporter API backend but
doesn’t have all the complexities of the US Census.
Wazi therefore supports a
much simpler data format that makes it easy to also import non-census
information, such as crime or education statistics, and still get all the benefits
of CensusReporter’s original technology. The big benefits include more options
for map visualization and geo-coded downloads. Code for South Africa also
simplified the mapping layer so that it can be run off Open Street Map instead
of a custom mapping server.
Census information is tough to access
and interpret at the best of times, but Wazi Map takes the headache out of
trawling through streams of data or legions of excel files when news staffers
are on deadline. “By going to Wazi Map, journalists can contextualize their
stories to find out what’s behind a violent protest or whether a community has
water, or what the education levels of a community are,” Kempe said.
“Alternately, journalists can take the information and embed it into the
stories or use the data visualisations, so readers can view the data at a quick
glance.”
“We’re now working with journalists to
show them how to use this tool, and to get feedback on their experiences when
using it. We’re also looking to plug a lot more information into the site so
that the tool becomes more and more useful,” Kempe said.
“What we do is take data and package it
in a way that citizens can use so that they can make better decisions,” said
Adi Eyal, a director at Code for South Africa. “The goal of Wazi is to
contextualize a place using as much data as possible – information like the
census, crime statistics, the efficacy of hospitals and more.”
Feedback from newsrooms has been so
good that Code for South Africa has been commissioned to build similar versions
for Kenya (where a prototype is already in public testing), Ghana and Nigeria.
The end result, Eyal hopes, is that
people will be empowered to make informed choices about what matters, from
“decisions about which medicines to buy, to who they should vote for, or what
suburb they should live in.”
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via United Nations Photo.
Global media innovation content related
to the projects and partners of the Knight Fellowships on IJNet is supported by
the John S. and
James L. Knight Foundation and edited by Jennifer Dorroh.
Source:
http://ijnet.org
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