How to create a good story on Data Campfire
Welcome!
Thanks for your interest in this guide to create a good story on Data Campfire.
We’ve just launched our beta version of the site, and your stories of using data in any industries of any fidelity would be super helpful for us. For you to understand our CREATE page better, and to help you to make engaging stories, I would like to give you some tips.
1. Keep your title, one liner, topic and lead image eye-catching and self-explanatory
Title, one liner, topic and lead image are the ones shown before people click through to your story, so keep it eye-catching and relevant.
We welcome anyone who is interested in data, so readers of your story may have different levels of understanding on the subject. So, keep the title and one liner jargon-free and self-explanatory. Think about how you would describe your project to people who don’t know much about your subject.
2. Explain the result, motivation and outcome of your project.
We provide different sections for you to explain what you made, why you worked on the project and what you’ve learnt from it.
If your project has something that you can embed, such as a map, chart, image, video or other rich media that is hosted elsewhere, you can simply paste the url for it and it will magically appear when you publish your story! For example, you can add your interactive map so that people can play with your creation.
3. Share the steps of how you made your project so that people can learn from your experience
The ‘Steps’ section allows you to share what you did step-by-step. For each step, you can add the source of the open datasets that you have used, description and your rating based on your data usage experience, which will feed back to data producers. Your feedback is valuable for data producers to create and publish better quality open data.
We have found an excellent tool for visually capturing your steps — Giphy Capture (for Mac users) and Giffing Tool (for Windows users), which you can make gifs out of your screen activities. For example, the story of dog bins in York has used gifs for each step. This would make a straightforward and visual way for people to follow your steps without having to watch a 1 hour tutorial on Youtube!
You can also simply add screenshots of your process, so that you can improve the understanding of people who will read your story.
That is it! We look forward to reading your data story, which will improve data literacy of people and the quality of open data.
You would like to improve our platform to become more user friendly. So let us know how we can improve the CREATE page for your needs through @datacampfire.
Thank you!
