DATA4CHAN.GE @ BEIRUT

Earlier this year I had opportunity to attend a 5-day data visualisation workshop run by DATA4CHAN.GE (http://www.data4chan.ge/) in
Beirut, Lebanon. These events are run annual or bi-annually, and allow human rights organisations and journalists to work with researchers, designers and developers to create data visualisations that can help change the world. They bring talented people in the visual storytelling community together with human rights organisations that have fascinating original datasets and powerful stories to tell. During these workshops interdisciplinary teams consisting of data researchers, coders, UX designers, graphic designers and human rights organisations create data visualisations and devise innovative advocacy strategies.

DATA4CHAN.GE is a not-for-profit workshop series run by staff from Beyond Words, a London-based data visualisation company, that in
the past has worked with the BBC, Facebook, Google PWC and Kew Gardens, to name but a few, and was represented by their Design Director, and also Small Media Foundation. Small Media is a London-based action lab, providing digital research, training and advocacy solutions to support the work of civil society actors that provides assistance to at-risk communities globally.

This includes:
• Providing Media Advocacy training and support
• Providing Digital Security training and consultancy services
• Working with CSOs to visualise their data to support advocacy work.
• Providing free secure hosting to websites
• Developing secure technology solutions

Small Media, who organise DATA4CHAN.GE workshops, was represented on the workshop by its co-founders, Stina Backer, and the company’s Director of Innovation and Media, Bronwen Robertson. The workshop’s organising committee was rounded out by Surasti Puri, a London-based freelance designer, Sarah Drinkwater from Google, Giorgio Boldi, a freelance designer from Milan, and Laura Makarem who owned the design space in which the workshop was located at AntWork, a great open-planned co-operative working space, split between inside and outside in the centre of downtown Beirut.

DATA4CHANGE helps Civil Society Organisations create powerful data-driven advocacy projects by connecting them with global and local experts in data, design, tech and journalism to forge real change.

Applicants to attend this workshop were sought via Social Media campaigns during the latter part of 2017, and were welcomed from any journalists, designers, code developers, programmers, and data visualisation experts from around the world. Being a keen traveller myself, and never having been to the middle East myself before (aside from transiting through airports on way way to the Far East on occasion), I jumped at the chance to apply in the hope of being selected. Places were scarce, with only 16 available from nearly 200 applicants. Those selected came from Brazil and Mexico, United States, England, Italy, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Singapore and Iran.

The fifth DATA4CHAN.GE took place in Beirut from 21–25 of February at Antwork. Attendees were divided into four teams, each to work with one of these Human Rights Organisations (HROs) selected by the organising committee, in taking a real-time, current human rights issue currently being promoted and pursued by the HRO. The four HROs selected for this workshop were The Yemen Polling Centre, The Anti Racism Movement, Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights and the Marahat Foundation, a organisation focused on advocating increased female participation and exposure on mainstream printed, TV and radio news and media.In the words of the Organising Committee themselves, “… These organisations were matched up with dataviz geniuses from all over the world to create data driven advocacy campaigns. The results were beyond our expectations! The creativity, talent and passion of all of the participants was amazing to see”.

**Logos of the four Human Rights Organisations at Data4Change @ Lebanon, 2018**

I was placed in the team supporting the Marahat Foundation; Maharat being Arabic for “woman”. This foundation worked to support women in the media and political movements, supporting them by providing media training, and raising awareness for women in the media and poetical arenas. Work on this project started some weeks prior to the actual workshop, with the HRO providing a near 3,000 record dataset detailing observations of presence of women, and also the discussions about women related issues on Lebanese TV when women are presented in the discussion and when they are not. Data were broken down for a point in time by a number of key variables, including Lebanese geographic region, discussion topic outline, women’s perceived field of expertise, access time (length of presence on TV), importance, media channel.

Aside from myself, the team also consisted of a Graphic Editor at Scientific American from New York), a Journalist from Cairo, a Type and Graphic Designer from Egypt), a Designer researcher from Egygt) as well as two representatives from the Marahat Foundation HRO itself. The team aimed to use these data to form an online vertical-scrolling story-telling campaign micro-site to highlight the stark discrepancies between media time given to males and females when the topic being discussed is women-centric or not, and also when women were present or not. Titling this campaign “A Seat At The News Desk”, a play on the old saying “a place at the table”, it started out by highlighting the differences between the female and male Lebanese population (54% compared with 46%), before continue on to the current gender ratio of guests featured on news programs being 88% male compared with 12% female. The next statistic, the ratio of speaking time given to male and female guests, was the real eye-opener, being 93% in favour of males. At this point the campaign product would break to highlight the fact that as Lebanon we look toward a future in which everyone’s voice is heard, the role of women in the election is an important piece of the conversation. This campaign would continue to aim support increasing the inclusion of
women in the forthcoming elections in Lebanon.

The Marahat Foundation are also currently developing a live database of women experts within Lebanon, expert in any knowledge area, which could be used by media companies to expand discussion panels on their TV shows and also pursue more gender-balanced discussions. These extra data allowed the team to suggest and design an early prototype for an online web tool that would allow female experts to submit their own details to this maintained database in the hope they could support and promote wider gender and
expertise balance in the media; this would constitute a second campaign concept for Marahat to promote and continue pursuing with
their web designers and projects managers once the workshop was over, in advance of the Lebanese elections. Once the story-telling feature ended, it moved into a prototype front-end for this very expert database, before finishing with the campaign’s Call To Action.