 Hi, how y'all doing I'm glad to get up here early so your brains aren't quite full yet So I'm very excited about that. So as Ethan mentioned my name is Rahul Vargiv I'm a researcher here at the Center for Civic Media and One of the things I want to talk to you about is this concept of speaking data So just without even talking about what it means raise your hand if you think that you speak data to a fair degree Yeah, so maybe half the room right now think about the rest of the population of Boston, right? that's a much lower number and This is a problem when you have great things happening like data-driven decision-making happening in governments But that's great to have policy informed by data-driven thinking now The problem is as soon as you try to communicate that you end up talking to a population that has a lot of question marks like data What are you talking about? You know, what does this even mean? What's this way of speaking? So this is a problem that I try to work on and Most people try to work on it by thinking about data literacy So what does the term data literacy mean when you pick that apart? So you can start off thinking about well the illiterate right a sort of a classic way to think about literacy Then the sort of the readers right the folks that are reading and then the writers who are generally the people in power So you have this spectrum of thinking about literacy and most people are applying that when they think about what data literacy is So who are the writers right because as I mentioned these are the ones that are in power So the writers are people like government, you know, these are the people that are authoring policy based on data You have newspapers of course are doing its great job facilitating that communicative exercise of telling a story Right and then you have people who of course the open internet have enabled them to become writers in lots of different ways including with data So when you think about literacy the first thing I do because you know I was trained in education is think about Freire and this is sort of my rendition It's always a little dangerous when you end up with a picture of an old white man on the screen, right? So forgive me that and just roll with me for a minute. So Freire a highly influential thinker in the field of education pedagogy is a fancy word we use for that and He started working in literacy right he started working on adult literacy and that's where he came up with his notion of popular education So what does that mean? So he's talking about a bunch of things that I take over and I bring into this world of data literacy So one is the idea that we have Instead of teachers or educators facilitators within a group working together right another idea is the idea that everyone who is involved in that Process brings something valuable and should be honored and respected right another one is a cycle of thinking and acting But the important part of acting is that it's acting on a real problem In your community that you can affect right so it's actually effective action and the way that he did that was you know Little things like having literacy training read the newspaper in the town you're in so you're more aware of current events, right? so I Take that and then I mix that up in a big soup with data literacy I end up with another idea and of course I'm an academic I work in academic institutions and we have to name things It's actually my contract we have to come up with new names So the name that I came up with is popular data the idea that I'm melding together Popular education and data literacy work so how is this different and the popular doesn't mean like you know Lots of people like it which hopefully is the case, but it actually means of the people right so what does that mean when you stick it together well? The difference that I see is that the data literacy work is about the what right the actual data and how to understand it The popular data work that I'm doing I try to position it as the why Why is it important to be able to do this? Why is this actually matter? So I want to play that out in four different ways for you to be concrete right? I was just abstract so let's be concrete about it right so four different groups of Points on that spectrum of going from illiterate to literate as it were one newspapers right already doing a great job of becoming Better writers in the data point from the data point of view You know you have examples like the data the data-driven journalism handbook You have little things like the Guardian actually posting links to the data that drove their story and other newspapers doing that So a lot of good stuff going on there already and I've sort of worked with them a second is government, right? governments and One of the key examples here is our wonderful partners at the state of Minas Gerais brought us down to Brazil to and from the key Insight that open data as a start not the end of this process So we went down there did a whole bunch of trainings building capacity Within the communities around government to use the data effectively to create to change they wanted to see So a third example Community organizations so community organizations a sort of semi-literate in this sense, right? So we help them in our data therapy program by doing lots of hands-on activities That actually help build their capacity to present their data and tell their stories in interesting ways and the fourth the sort of People with question marks around them the illiterate the idea that we can actually build their capacity to effectively use information To do things and this is the point that the key insight is that we want to build more writers not more readers and The way we do that using this popular data approach is by Modeling and taking all of the sort of fair and approach to things and building hands-on activities So if you're interested about this civic use case, which I haven't mentioned technology at all And of course it relies on a lot of tech But if you're interested more in the civic use, please come find me afterwards. We have a lot of activities We're trying to build toolkills. We have a bunch of examples of these murals and workshops that we're doing And I hope that you have some great questions for me later about the concept and where the differences lie. Thank you very much