Naked Data: Political poop, politeness and pollution

Naked Data is a weekly newsletter with a selection of the most interesting open data and data journalism news from South Africa and the world, published by Code for South Africa.

Something weird happens when cold, hard data butts up against the slimy, oozy nebulousness that is politics: the politics at first shrinks back, and then tries to envelope and dissolve the data, or at least leave a stain that will never come out. (It’s not just data — this tends to happen when politics bumps up against anything.) There’s some long reads on this in our #Don’t Miss section, but they’re seriously all worth it, especially the first (and longest), on bullshit.

#Don’t Miss

On bullshit

“Very few claims are eye-catching, surprising or emotionally resonant because they are true and fair.” Economist Tim Harford explains how politicians bend numbers to their will — or just make them up — and how they’ve poisoned the data well for all of us.The best pieces of writing on the importance and dangers of data I’ve read.

Open data’s politeness problem

It’s smack-down time. Tom Steinberg, founder of UK open data pundit MySociety, says that we’ve been too polite about open data for too long, and any transparency worth having is probably going to be something the politicians fight against. “Meaningful transparency is only ever beaten out of governments with a stick made of pure power politics.”

The free ride is over

Co-founder of Journalism++, Nicolas Kayser-Bril, argues that government data is pretty crap anyway, and the future of open data is for us to find ways of collecting it ourselves.

We’re all screwed anyway

Co-founder of The Verge Joshua Topolsky bitches (eloquently) about how we traded quality for quantity, and how the Next Big Thing is not going to save the media from itself.

#Africa

The Declaration of Windhoek — 25 years on

The Third of May 1991 saw the release of The Declaration of Windhoek, a cornerstone of press freedom in the region, and the world. We’ll be celebrating 3 May as World Press Freedom Day, but it’s worth looking back on the Declaration, and measuring where we are on the scale of media freedom, which is what the Declaration’s 25th Anniversary website aims to achieve. (Pithy hashtag: #WHK25.)

Using tech for media freedom in Africa

As part of the #WHK25 ICFJ’s Stephen Abbott Pugh looks at drones, phones and 3D printers that data journs are using to do awesome (and meaningful) journalism on the continent.

1TB data leak from Kenya

I do think Anonymous is a bunch of misguided twats, but perhaps there will be something interesting in the 1TB data leak from Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that its promising to release on Tor.

#Data

Panama Papers to release data

The Panama Papers data will be released! Yay! But not all of it. Boo! On 9 May at 8pm SAST, (not quite) all will be revealed. “The database will not include records of bank accounts and financial transactions, emails and other correspondence, passports and telephone numbers. The selected and limited information is being published in the public interest.”

Hindustan Times air quality

Since I live by the sea surrounded by mountains, with my house practically backing on to a nature reserve, with a fresh, cool breeze blowing in most days from the Antarctic, I really have no idea what it’s like to have to breath shitty air most days of the week. It must suck. It must suck more when there’s no good measure of bad air, and so no real urgency to deal with it. The tool has already generated numerous stories in India’s biggest newspaper, with a daily circulation of over one million readers. And for a local link, Nic Dawes, ex-M&G editor when I was there and now chief content and editorial officer at the HT, was part of the team that built it.

#Finally

You won’t believe how stupid we are

Well, maybe you will believe it, especially if you keep falling for clickbait headlines like I do. A new regular feature on ProPublica and Source called Visual Evidence kicks off with using visualisations to prove how fallible our precious human brains can be.

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