Lessons learned from the data journalism conference NICAR 2018

Code for Africa’s representatives brought back advice for local newsrooms from an international events in Chicago.

For those who have been following its development for years, it’s easy to forget how novel digital tools for data-driven insights are to many journalists. Even more alien are some of the ways to organise project teams, which come from software development schools such as Agile, rather than traditional newsroom management processes.

Code for Africa’s data editor Jacopo Ottaviani was recently in Chicago to attend the 2018 National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR)Conference , an annual data journalism event organised by Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) and NICAR itself.

The conference was attended by American and international media, in particular their data and development teams, as well as journalists who want to learn more about investigative data journalism. The 2018 event had the largest number of non-American attendants with a majority coming from Europe and Latin America.

However, Ottaviani says that there were few representatives from Asia and even less from Africa.

Ottaviani handles a distributed team of data journalists and developers who collaborate in various countries across Africa. It’s therefore no surprise that the sessions he found most useful were the ones focusing on cross-functional team management. By definition, cross-functional teams are groups of people with different expertise, working together on a common project, while sometimes based in different locations.

Ottaviani notes that a lot of organisations represented at NICAR operate on a similar model to Code for Africa, with distributed teams of designers, developers, journalists, data wranglers working together remotely. The sessions on building happy cross-functional teams and bootstrapping a small team, brought together media managers of distributed, multidisciplinary teams to share tips on how to best handle projects and timelines.

During the sessions, the following Agile project management methods emerged as very useful tips on working with cross-functional teams:

• Daily Standups These are a useful way for team members to share what they are planning to do during the day. A great tool for effective stand-ups include having a three-question agenda as outlined in the Scrum Guide. The scrum meeting, in an agile development world, has every team member answer three simple questions:

i) What did you accomplish since the last meeting?

ii) What are you working on until the next meeting?

iii) What is getting in your way or keeping you from doing your job?

• Weekly Catch up A weekly call during which teams discuss priorities and catch up on what’s been done.
• Retrospective analyses of projects Following the launch of a large project, teams work together to analyse what worked well, what didn’t, and what can be improved. Retrospectives are very useful for teams and managers to improve processes and manage future projects in a more efficient way.

Ottaviani is now introducing some of these techniques for his team at Code for Africa. Similar methods are being introduced by other teams at Code for Africa, including the tech team based in Nairobi.

Extra resources for your work

Given that there were few African colleagues at NICAR 2018, it’s good news that many of the presentations from conference are now online, and it’s highly recommended that you use them. Ottaviani suggests starting with this presentation on the pitfalls of data visualisation by dataviz luminary and professor Alberto Cairo.

There is also this step-by-step Github guide for journalists, this tutorial on R , as well as as this session on sensor journalism. For more on the conference, check out this comprehensive list of presentations tutorials, tools, and software discussed and shared at NICAR 2018.

Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of data journalism and civic technology laboratories, with labs in four countries and affiliates in a further six countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA’s labs also incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives, including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental africanDRONE network, and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting(ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent.CfA is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).