This project entered the DJA in the category Data-Driven Applications (local/regional). It is based on the analysis of reports released on a yearly basis by the Illinois State Board of Education about the performance of public schools and school districts in Illinois, United States. "On the state website, the data is poorly presented, and in its raw form, the information is not understandable by a layman," read the comments of the team behind the project submitted via the competition entry form.

This Chicago Tribune application, created by news apps editor Brian Boyer, news apps developer Joe Germuska and graphic artist Alex Bordens, aims to make the state's annual data dump (plus data from other sources) accessible to "the fine people of Illinois." Starting from the assumption that plain data isn't interesting, the News Applications team worked closely with reporters and editors to tell the interesting and important stories "hidden" in the data. 

The interface of the searchable database

The project, which took six weeks to complete, relies primarily on the school report cards data set from the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). The authors also integrated data on student immunization from ISBE, and hooked into data provided by ProPublica's application The Opportunity Gap. Commenting on the results achieved through this application the team said: "The 2011 redesign of the School Report Cards application transformed a data-filled beast into something beautiful and accessible," also noting how the work began with surveys and subsequent interviews with parents, followed by intense, iterative information design work. 

The site tells the stories that the education team deemed important (where a school sits within a distribution, how a school performs within a district), and relates information that parents want, such as test scores or demographics. "After the surveying and the deciding, there was a lot of programming, working with data and chart-making involved," said the project developers. Data crunching was performed in Python with MongoDB, web development in Python and Django, HTML/CSS was also employed, while Flot was used for most charts and "lots of little bits of Javascript were applied for interactivity."

The biggest challenge was the sheer enormity of the data to be analysed: with 3,905 rows and an impressive 9,582 columns, regular data analysis tools like Excel did not prove helpful and simply "choked on data this big, so we had to adopt new tools, especially MongoDB, to make sense of it all."

An overview of some of the findings revealed by the project

This application is the central hub for the series of stories the Chicago Tribune writes annually based on the new schools data. On the homepage visitors will find links to many stories the newspaper helped report based on the data presented through this app. Most of the data visualisation is simple: just charts and tables with a histogram or two "sprinkled in for good measure." The developers believe this was, perhaps shamefully they add, the first application where the News Application team worked very closely with the graphics desk - an information designer "interned" with the team for three weeks to realize this project. Talking about the importance of visualisation for an effective end result, Boyer, Germuska and Bordens noted that "in exchange for it looking beautiful, we spent many hours training our new colleague on how websites are made. That was a challenge, but also pretty fun."

Through the application many people learned about the schools their children attend and the project generated more than 60,000 page views a month, mostly via search. "People around here love it," is the final remark of the data team when asked about feedback from their readers. The best reward a data journalism team can hope to get is an enthusiastic response from their audience and the Chicago Tribune application seems to have succeeded in this. 

Advice for aspiring data journalists:

"Think of your audience. Ask them their needs. Then make software that they'll find useful. It seems like a simple rule, but you'd be surprised how often this is not the path to making things in a newsroom."

The Data Journalism Awards are a Global Editors Network initiative supported by Google and organized in collaboration with the European Journalism Centre. Please visit the Data Journalism Awards website for the full list of nominees.

"The numbers of the Finnish government's budget are so senselessly large that they are almost meaningless. The money the state spends is nonetheless your money, so the general public should be aware of how it is being spent," writes the team behind Verokuitti in the DJA application form. 

Verokuitti (Finnish for "tax receipt") entered the Data Journalism Awards in the category Data-Driven Applications (national/international). The application shows the Finnish tax payer what they have contributed to various areas of government spending. Anyone can access the website (in Finnish) or navigate the English version, enter their monthly gross income and get their own personalized tax receipt. "We thought that the best way to visualize the tax payers' contribution to the state was through a normal receipt as you would get from a grocery store," explains the team.

A detailed personalised tax receipt for former MP Jyrki Kasvi

50.000 people (1% of Finland's population) used the application within 24 hours of its launch. The project received attention from the government, traditional media and the Finnish open data movement as well. Verokuitti is now widely used as an example of a successful application of open data in public administration.

Marketing expert Pär Österlund, data wrangler Kari Silvennoinen and web designer Jon Haglund worked independently in their spare time over a period of two months to create this application. Their goal was to generate discussion around government expenditure and to raise awareness of it in a segment of the public that would not normally be interested in state budget matters. Their core philosophy was "if the information is presented in a compelling way, more Finnish taxpayers would be interested in what happens in the government." 

The main data source for this project was the government budget as published by the Finnish Ministry of Finance. To better illustrate some aspects, Silvennoinen, Österlund and Haglund used other public data sources as well, including from Statistics Finland, Eurostat, the Finnish Tax Authority and the Finnish Transport Safety Agency. A complete list of the sources used is available on the project website.

A lot of work involving Excel, R and Ruby went into cleaning and getting the data into a usable format, while web programming and design skills were essential for putting the data online. Finally, marketing and social media skills were required to make the service interesting and to attract visitors: Facebook and Twitter were essential tools in spreading the message.

When asked about the biggest challenges met during the preparation of the project, the team pointed out three main issues: (1) making the data accessible in an easy to understand format to people who had little or no idea of how the government works, (2) accurately estimating tax distribution on an individual taxpayer level and, last but not least, (3) gain visibility, which was achieved mainly through social media.

Advice for aspiring data journalists:

"Go big. Keep it simple."

The Data Journalism Awards is a Global Editors Network initiative supported by Google and organized in collaboration with the European Journalism Centre. Please visit the Data Journalism Awards website for the full list of nominees.

Pedestrian Crashes in Novosibirsk 2011 was one of the nine data projects nominated for the category Data Visualisation and Storytelling (local/regional). The project is an interactive map that shows all the road accidents involving pedestrians in Novosibirsk, Russia, in 2011. Accidents can be explored by month or for the whole year. The data shows the outcome of the accident, e.g. the type of injury incurred by the pedestrian, the driver's gender and age, the pedestrian's gender and age and if the accident occurred on a sidewalk or not. Monthly and yearly statistics about the number of pedestrians injured and their gender are displayed on the left side of the page.

Designer Nikolay Guryanov, along with developers Stas Seletskiy and Alexey Papulovskiy, worked independently in their spare time to create this map over the period of one year. In the interview accompanying the application form, the team behind the project explains: "We tried to draw attention to the problem of pedestrian crashes in the city by the clear and detailed presentation of all the accidents. As a result, the map drew the attention of local and federal media and provoked discussions in Novosibirsk." 

The maps and timeline to navigate through pedestrian accidents in Novosibirsk (Google translation)

The data for this map was obtained from the accident reports published daily by Novosibirsk GIBDD (the State Inspectorate for Road Traffic Safety) on their website.

The skills necessary for the project were Javascript coding, HTML, and map visualization. The tools used included Google Maps API Style Wizard, jQuery and Photoshop.

Asked about the challenges they encountered, the project team wrote: "The very tough challenge was to provide data and to refrain from conclusions about who to blame for the poor road safety situation. We tried to demonstrate that the problem is complex."

Users can choose to navigate the data through various maps (original Russian version)

The project received a lot of attention in Russia. The team behind the project had four interviews with local and federal TV channels and several articles in news media.

Advice for aspiring data journalists:

"Try to present rich data in a clear manner and give viewers the chance to come to their own conclusions."

The Data Journalism Awards is a Global Editors Network initiative supported by Google and organized in collaboration with the European Journalism Centre. Please visit the Data Journalism Awards website for the full list of nominees.

The map allows users to compare total homicides and drug-related homicides over time. Filters can be used to specify the type of drug associated with the homicide: marijuana, opium and cocaine.

Users can click on a bubble on the map to get information about the number and type of homicides in a particular location up to 2004. A timeline feature enables the user to track the evolution of drug war-related homicides in a specific region between 2004 and 2010. 

Screenshot of the interactive map designed by Diego Valle-Jones 

"The really cool thing about the map is that it makes it very easy to select regions of Mexico and link directly to them, which makes refuting mistaken claims by government officials, like the one Poiré made last year, a cinch" he wrote on his blog, also adding that "the map is a work in progress and is still missing the cocaine routes, but hopefully I'll be able to add them shortly."

For homicide data Valle-Jones used as sources Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) and Citizen's Institute for the Study of Insecurity (ICESI). 

In creating this project the developer was inspired by some of the charts on the Learning R blog and the Junkcharts blog. 

The interactive map can be accessed on Valle-Jones' blog. The source code for this project is available on Github.

Major findings

The research question that sits at the core of the L.A. Times project is: "Who cast the votes?," which translates into: "Who determines the winners of the Oscars?" The publication's Data Desk team unleashed the investigative skills of more than 20 reporters and researchers to identify the composition of the Academy in terms of age, gender and race of its members. The aim was to verify the claim that the organisation is an old, monolithic institution and to understand how its composition might influence voting behaviour. 

In a short video introduction to the project, reporters John Horn and Nicole Sperling explain that the outcome of the demographics analysis shows that 94% of the Academy members are white, with a median age of 62. 77% are male. "I think the Academy was a little surprised by the findings of the study, but again they say their hands are tied. They can only recognise people who are getting jobs in Hollywood," says Horn in the video, which also addreses the question of whether the organisation is doing all it can to make its membership as diverse as it can be. 

Founded in 1927, the Academy introduced the prestigious Oscar Awards two years later. The organisation has never published a complete members' list.

The preliminary research behind the study took about eight months. During these eight months Times' reporters confirmed the identities of more than 5,100 Oscar voters - more than 89% of all active voting members. The results are available on the L.A. Times' Data Desk website as charts, graphs and maps showing the age, gender, race and geographical location of actors, directors, producers, writers, public relations officers, cinematographers, documentarists and other categories making up the 16 branches of the Academy. 

Predominantly male, old and white: the composition of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences according to the L.A. Times' study

Method

According to the methodology overview, the documents used in the study are two undated lists of presumed academy members obtained from industry sources. The Times combined these sources into a master list of more than 6,200 names. The study looked only at active voting members. The research team then started confirming the identities of the members through in-person, telephone and e-mail interviews; confirmation also came from members' publicity and talent agencies and managers, media reports, personal biographies, social networking profiles and resumes, lists of academy members who participated in academy fundraising and academy publications. Public records, commercial databases, guild publications, the oscars.org website and individual interviews were used to determine the basic demographics and the win history of each member.

Lack of openness of the Academy officials as to who is an active voting member, made it impossible for the project team to resolve discrepancies between the numbers of active voting members coming from all the different industry sources and thus constitutes a limitation of the study.

A note on how the statistics were derived explains how the team dealt with this limitation:

"To calculate percentages, The Times assumed that the small fraction of those who could not be confirmed as members or whose demographics were not obtainable were, in fact, very much like the academy as a whole. Thus, in each branch The Times divided the number of people whose demographics were known by the total on its list of confirmed and presumed members, a denominator that was usually higher than the academy's reported membership."

A second round of calculations was carried out for the sake of transparency:

"The Times made a secondary calculation assuming that every potential member who could not be accounted for was a non-white woman in her 30s. In this calculation, those whose demographics were known were divided by the academy's reported membership. In addition, if The Times' list was greater than the academy's, the difference was subtracted from the white and male members and the oldest prior to the calculation."

The results are illustrated in the tables below: 

The percentages calculated by the Data Desk team 

The full overview of the study results together with the maps, charts and tables created by the L.A. Times are available on the L.A. Times Data Desk's website. 

It all started on 4 August with a man shot dead by the police during an attempted arrest in north London. The death of 29-year-old Mark Duggan ignited a series of urban riots, looting and disorder, that the U.K. was no longer used to since the 1980s Brixton Riots. Two days after Duggan’s death, violence erupted from what had started as a peaceful protest demanding justice and an investigation into the dynamics of the shooting.

The 2011 U.K. riots crippled the country and attracted international media attention for four consecutive days. They were met by an unprecedented swift and harsh response on the side of British courts. The political establishment blamed the role played by social networks and instant messaging technology in spreading the violence across the country.

The Guardian’s 'Reading the Riots' is a multimedia project that applies data journalism in order to try to understand the reasons and individual stories behind such extraordinary events, to analyze the root causes and the consequences.

The project is the result of an ongoing cooperation between the Guardian and the London School of Economics (LSE). It is strongly focused on researching the social base of the riots. Divided into two main phases, 'Reading the Riots' combines print and online articles, video interviews and features, interactive maps and visualizations, and a series of open debates organized in the local communities affected by the riots.

"The first phase of Reading the Riots was completed in three months using confidential interviews with hundreds of people directly involved in the riots in six cities. It also involved a separate analysis, by academics at Manchester University, of a database of more than 2.5m riot-related tweets. The second phase – to be completed in 2012 –, will involve interviews with police, court officials and judges and a series of community-based debates about the riots," explains the Guardian. 

The interviews were conducted by a team of 30 researchers selected through the Guardian's website and trained with funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. Contact was made with 1,000 individuals who had been involved in the riots. The Ministry of Justice also granted access to 13 people convicted for their involvement in the disorders. The 270 interviewees who accepted to take part in the study were asked questions such as how they first heard about the riots, how they became involved, how they communicated, what they did, why they thought the riots had stopped and how they felt about their actions months after the events. 

After collecting the material, a team of five research analysts recruited by the LSE began analysing the content of the transcripts in order to try to establish particular themes and their recurrence: a list of coding labels was produced and their relationships recorded and displayed on a thematic map document which allowed the research team to visualise the overall picture around the root causes of the riots. 

Phase two of the research study is strongly focused on the community aspect of the riots and is aimed at bringing the individual experiences of community members, police officers and representatives of the judiciary into open interaction through open debates. This phase aims at understanding the direct aftermath of the riots and how the courts system coped with it. The same interviewing methodology will be now applied to judges and magistrates, police officers, court staff and prosecutors and defence lawyers. 

Outcome

Although the project is work in progress, the Guardian's 'Reading the Riots' website already features interesting insights. Data and visualisations are available to explore and share. An overview of the most captivating projects is provided below.

Interactive Timeline of the Riots

The timeline allows readers to navigate the unfolding of the events over time. It is linked to relevant articles published by the Guardian. Fires, riots, political intervention, court rulings and clean-ups are all displayed and cover a period spanning from August 4th to September 1st, 2011. 

The map provides an immediate visualisation of the density of the events

The Riot Commute Map Animation

England's riots: Mapping the distance from home to offence

In explaining the methodology applied to the study the Guardian writes that:

"The data came from 1,100 individual's magistrates' courts records collected by the Guardian. For around 600 of them, postcodes for both home and offence location were available. The ITO World (the UK's top transport data mapping company) analysis is based on a smaller sample of 400 where both postcodes were detailed enough to allow exact mapping. There are some hefty caveats: we don't know for sure that those accused of rioting took these routes, or that they left from home. This is, in effect, a model for what might have happened. According to analysis by ITO world - based on the Guardian's database of riot-related court records - the average distance from home to where defendants were accused of a riot offence was just over two miles, or a half hour walk."

The maps and data used for the animation are available at the Guardian's Datablog. 

How Rumors Spread on Twitter: An interactive analysis

The aim of this project was to show the "birth and death of rumors on Twitter" on the basis of 2.6 million tweets provided by the social network and somehow 'related to' the riots for containing some key hashtags. The Guardian describes how the method behind this first selection worked: "With help from an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Universities of Manchester, St Andrews and Leicester, we distilled the overall corpus down to a series of subsets related to each rumour. We then undertook a more hands-on approach to find the tweets that best represented each story." The graphic part of the research was inspired by projects like Bloom's Fizz, which represents Tweets as circles grouped into larger circles.

"In our case, this grouping would place the items into clusters - each comprising a set of retweets for a given tweet. To make this work, we needed to find which tweets belong to each cluster. Again, our academic partners proved invaluable, providing a parametrized Levenshtein distance algorithm for finding all tweets within a certain "distance" from each other in textual terms," describes the Guardian article explaining the story behind the project.

Developers Martin Shuttleworth and Robin Beitra built an interactive timeline that would allow each rumour to be replayed like a video and Beitra also built alternative renderers for WebGL, HTML5 Canvas and Flash so that even older browsers would have access, thus granting access to the visualisation to the biggest possible audience. "Martin did some great work to make an interactive playhead that lets the rest of the system what time it is. Backbone.js proved very useful for keeping everything in sync. We added a graph of tweet volume over time to help people find the most interesting parts of the story. This is drawn in SVG or VML depending on browser capability," adds the article in the Guardian, which also defines the project as "one of the most ambitious pieces we have ever built, both in terms of data analysis and dynamic graphics." 

The birth and death of rumors on Twitter during the riots

Find out more about the 'Reading the Riots' project on the Guardian's dedicated website. Background and results of the study have also been published as an ebook in the 'Guardian Shorts' series.

Among the highlights:

• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on Top Secret programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence at over 10,000 locations across the country. Over 850,000 Americans have Top Secret clearances.
• Redundancy and overlap are major problems and a symptom of the ongoing lack of coordination between agencies.
• In the Washington area alone, 33 building complexes for Top Secret work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.

This is the first and most comprehensive examination of the complex system. It was reported by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Dana Priest and author, researcher, and military expert William M. Arkin. The findings are based on hundreds of interviews with current and former military and intelligence officials and public records. Nearly two dozen journalists worked on the investigation, including investigative reporters, cartography experts, database reporters, video journalists, researchers, interactive graphic designers, digital designers, graphic designers, and graphics editors at The Washington Post.

“This country’s top-secret national-security enterprise is both enormous and opaque,” Marcus Brauchli, The Post’s executive editor said. “We have sought through this long-term investigative project to describe it and enable our readers— including citizens, taxpayers, policymakers and legislators—to understand the scale and effectiveness of what has been created. The Post remains firmly committed to this kind of accountability journalism.”

In addition to the stories in the series, a blog anchors the Top Secret America site providing updates on Top Secret America coverage, original journalism and insight around related national security matters. The Top Secret America blog serves as an online destination for further reporting, discussion, analysis, and interaction. 

A graphic from The Washington Post’s investigative project “Top Secret America” that allows readers to explore the connections between government agencies and companies doing top secret work (photo: atwar.blogs.nytimes.com)

Other multimedia features include:

• A searchable database illustrates information about government organizations that contract out Top Secret work, companies they contract to, the types of work they do, and the places where they do it.
• A map displays locations of all the clusters of Top Secret activity and some basic information about those areas.
• Each of nearly 2,000 companies and 45 government organizations has a profile page with basic information about its role in Top Secret America, and readers can filter searches by companies doing a specific kind of work, all companies mentioned in the story, or all companies with more than $750 million in revenue.
• A video guide to Top Secret America provides a concise, 90-second visual overview of the project’s major findings and implications.
• A video produced by PBS Frontline previews the series and illuminates the process of reporting. From the high-tech barn where Arkin worked to Priest’s guided-tour outside the NSA campus to a photographer’s experience shooting, the video captures how the information was gathered and evolved into the final series.

Read more about the Top Secret America investigation on the Washington Post's dedicated website, where you can also explore the data and the interactive maps, and join live Q&A sessions. 

Source: Washington Post press release

The article gives helpful information about how all of these numbers break down and what they mean. The article explains that "most of the EU's money comes from member nation contributions, 108.5 billion EUR in 2010". Because of the fact that this is not completely straightforward to everyone, the Guardian's own graphic artist, Paul Scruton, visualises the data for us, so that it is easier to understand (see above). The data goes on to tell us that, "the biggest item of spending is the Common Agricultural Policy - which incorporates rural development and a small amount on fisheries."

More importantly though, is the fact that full datasets and spreadsheets of all the EU budget data is made available at the end of the article for anyone to read and make use of. This enables readers to not only get a glimpse into the EU's personal spending book, but it also allows them to take the information and run with it. The data world is your oyster. What will you make of it? (For the full article, please visit the Guardian Data Blog website).

How public funds should be spent is often controversial. Information about how that money has already been spent should not be ambiguous at all. People arguing about the future will care about the present, and if data about past or present public spending is available, many will certainly look at it. When they do, occasionally they will find errors, or believe themselves to have found errors.

OpenSpending, which aims to track every (public) government and corporate financial transaction across the world, encourages users to:

• augment the existing spending database with additional sources of data
• use that data -- e.g., to write evidence-based articles and formulate informed decisions about how their society is financed.

Spending Stories is our effort to make OpenSpending a natural way to do data journalism about public spending.

THE PROBLEM

FACT 1: Errors occur in data, no matter how official the source.

FACT 2: Data wrangling (manipulating or restructuring datasets to correct inaccuracies, remix with other datasets to augment the data, or perform calculations on the data), generally improves data quality, for example, through reconciling entities and flagging amounts that are obviously incorrect.

FACT 3: Data wrangling can also introduce errors if not tackled correctly.

Crucial to ensuring the use of this data in articles or ensuring re-use by concerned citizens is the ability to show that the data is valid. In addition, maintaining a good relationship with public bodies who are confident that they are not being misrepresented in the data is vital to ensuring the data continues to be released in the first place. In practice, this means that the provenance of the data has to be clear including:

• where the data originally came from (preferably a URL)
• whether anyone (e.g., government, community data wrangler, or OpenSpending) has worked on the data since it was published, and what steps they took to change the data (i.e., these steps should be reproducible to produce the same result)

The OpenSpending team has gone to lengths to retain enough information to say who was responsible for both of the above.

OpenSpending is a system, somewhat like a wiki, which allows you to track back through the data wrangling process and work out what changes were made to the data, when and by whom.

ERROR REPORTING IN PRACTICE

OpenSpending recently received a pointed inquiry from the U.K. Treasury disputing the claims we were making about the payment of British public money to a private company. Believing that an error had been introduced, we attempted to retrace our steps and find out where this had occurred, and who was responsible.

As we discovered, the payment had actually taken place, but the the OpenSpending descriptions used to label the transaction were not sufficiently detailed to accurately reflect the item in question.

With Spending Stories, we were able to retrace our steps because we had preserved a copy of the software tools we used for collecting the data (the data is published by about 50 public bodies, and must be downloaded, stitched together, and firmly molded into shape). These tools had been also made available to the public, so the Treasury and other concerned citizens could have checked our work themselves; the availability of this kind of check keeps all participants in the fiscal debate honest.

What had gone wrong was a problem of terminology: The transactions existed, but ambiguous language had been used to describe them, glossing over the distinction between the government department reporting what money had been spent and the government agency which actually spent the money. The bodies in question were the Department of Health and a regional health care trust; this distinction is certainly one which a concerned citizen would expect to be made clearly -- so we should make sure our system makes it easy to know which question is being asked.

CHECKPOINTS IN OPENSPENDING

In the short term, we are mitigating the problem of data errors as follows:

• Data provenance - is the source identifiable and the process reproducible? OpenSpending encourages people to add modified datasets to a "package" in the Data Hub. This allows other users to see the original document alongside any modified documents and track the chain of changes made to see clearly which points errors could have been introduced.
• Crowdsourcing feedback on spending data.
• Permitting re-use of the structured data we present, so that it can inform decisions in other fact-checking systems.

Ultimately, we will build our part of the ecosystem to provide feedback to the political process, by improving democratic discourse about the public finances.

Lucy Chambers is a community coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. She works on the OKF's OpenSpending project and coordinates the data-driven-journalism activities of the foundation, including running training sessions and helping to streamline the production of a collaboratively written handbook for data journalists.

Martin Keegan is a software engineer and linguist, currently leading the Open Knowledge Foundation's OpenSpending project. He is also on the Open Knowledge Foundation's board, and has worked for SRI, Citrix, University of Cambridge and co-founded and worked for various civil society organizations.

The LRA Crisis Tracker is a real-time crisis mapping platform and data collection system, which makes information about the attacks and movement of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Africa publicly available. The LRA is a rebel group held responsible for Africa’s longest-running armed conflict. The LRA operates in Uganda, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, and is accused of violence against civilians and forcing children to participate in hostilities.

The tool is produced by Invisible Children, an international NGO working to assist communities in LRA-affected areas of Central Africa, and Resolve, a Washington D.C.-based NGO advocating for an end to atrocities perpetrated by the LRA. It combines empirical data with storytelling, visually engaging data representation and narrative-rich media.

Why is the LRA Crisis Tracker essential?

Incidents taking place in Africa can easily go ignored when they happen in remote areas where communication is nearly impossible. According to a press release of the creators of this platform, four out of five LRA incidents have never been reported by any Western or regional news source in spite of the fact that LRA attacks on civilians occur on average every 21 hours.

The project is aimed both at informing local communities through an early-warning radio network about the activities of the LRA as well as informing the organisations that support the affected communities in order to reduce their response time to incidents. For the media the platform is a source of real-time information. Journalists can sign up with their email address to receive breaking news on the conflict.

Michael Poffenberger, Executive Director of Resolve, explains: 'Not only is this a pioneering tool for activists and policymakers, but community-run protection organisations in Central Africa will directly benefit from regular reports analysing LRA movement and attack patterns. The response time to LRA atrocities should be three hours, not three months.'

How does it work?

The LRA Crisis Tracker consists of a digital map, a breaking news feed, biweekly data-analysis reports and a mobile application. A plotted map shows incidents by type on a timeline. 

Screenshot of the LRA Crisis Tracker showing data from the beginning of 2011

With the timeline the movement of the LRA can be followed. Below the map there is a real time feed listing the most recent news. Biweekly reports are compiled on the LRA activities.

You can learn more about how the map and the database were produced in the project documentation released by the creators of this platform. A part of the raw data fed into the platform is available for public download under the Open Data Common’s Open Database License.

Explore the LRA Crisis Tracker at LRACrisisTracker.com.

Have you used the LRA Crisis Tracker in your work? Let us know your experience with it by leaving a comment.