What if we all collaborated on data literacy and building data skills?
In today’s world, Data is everywhere, everything is a data project. We may not all be good at maths and statistics, but we all have a role to play in helping our teams and organisations be more data-driven and data-informed.
Often organizations focus on data science as the output of ‘data ready’ or a ‘data-driven organization.’ We are leaving people behind by not being equitable in the application of technology and the potential opportunities this brings. More and more organizations are building a data culture shift to upskill staff, processes, and infrastructure to be more data savvy.
IFRC, the Centre for Humanitarian Data, FabRiders and others are collaborating to form a Data Literacy Consortium.
Many humanitarian and civil society organisations are currently focusing on improving data literacy. The Consortium provides a mechanism for organisations to share resources and expertise.
The foundation for the Consortium is the Data Playbook developed by IFRC which is a collection of social learning resources to drive data literacy. The Data Playbook is published on an open/creative commons license that makes it available for external entities to reuse and modify.
Our current draft mandate of the Data Literacy Consortium is to:
- Co-create the next Data Playbook
- Share best practices
- Convene learning spaces – online and in person (webinars, training)
- Provide opportunities for questions to get answered
- Build products/services to help advance the mandate
Honouring the pioneers
We want to honour that this isn’t the first conversation about data literacy and we aim to learn and build from other’s who have done it already. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for School of Data‘s excellent and hard work on convening a global network of data literacy practitioners in developing curricula.
We’ve also learned from Rahul Bhargava (MIT Center for Civic Media) & Catherine D’Ignazio (Engagement Lab) on their important work on Data Basic & the Data Culture Project.
How can you and your organisation contribute?
Firstly, ask how might your organisation benefit from participating in a consortium around data literacy. Have you developed your own methods:
- To get teams to define a workflow for a data-driven project?
- To drive discussions around ethics and protecting the data your organisation is collecting?
- To explain and exemplify the benefits of data standards?
- To use data in decision making?
Or would you like to know how others are approaching these and other data-related topics?
Get Involved
The easiest way to get involved is to register interest and RSVP for our next Network Meeting. We will share a video recording with you after the call. And, if you can’t join, we will have a shared note space where you can add your contributions.
We realise that not everyone can make the meeting given busy schedules, but please still register for the next meeting and select the box marked ‘keep me informed’ to get updates on the Consortium via email. You can also follow the hash-tag on social media: #DataLiteracy #dataskills.
If you want to have a one-on-one conversation about the Consortium:
- If you are working on humanitarian and data literacy issues, send an email to Heather.LESON AT ifrc.org.
- If you are working on civil society and data literacy issues, send an email to Consortium AT FabRiders.net