 I work with an organization called Tactical Technology Collective. We are not a profit-based... not a few places, but a small organization of about 25 people spread across. I think four times though, and five times though. We primarily are a technology resource not a profit working with human rights advocates in many parts of the world. We've been in back to that presence in Bangalore for a little while in a little office in Cooktown, where I work out of. And one of the things we do is... one of the things we've been doing over the last several years is doing a lot of data visualization work working with partners, working with little communities, working with other NGOs. Most of this is focused on how data is used, evidence is used, data is used in advocacy work. Of course, all this has taught us a few things and we tried to tell our story in the West Pass we were in. That's what I think I'm going to be doing this afternoon. A quick question. How many people are going to throw things at me if I read a few paragraphs? Okay, so it's an unconference. I shouldn't be reading long texts, but my question was how many people are going to throw things at me if I decide to read a few paragraphs? I promise to keep it interesting. Okay, that's... I'm going to ignore the couple of times that I'm coming up. So that's the technology collective and what I'm going to be talking about today is something we launched very recently, a couple of weeks ago. It's called Drawing by Numbers. It's primarily a website. And I'll talk more about what the website is in a minute, but I'm just going to read a short piece of text from a few paragraphs. This text is on the website and I'm going to go ahead and read it to you then. So four years ago, we started working with visualizations, evidence, and advocacy. Each of our journeys in the street has led us to more questions than answers at times. If we are more excited than ever about what can be done with data and design to create social change. We thought it was time to look at what we know and what we still don't know and turn it inside out. The data and design how-to will do just that. So one of the things that goes up on the website is what we call in data and design how-to, which is a series of articles which highlight how we've published every few weeks on the site full of observations and advice on data and design and activism. We try to show us in our workings covering topics like how to get data, how to organize it, how to tell stories with data. We also do get security analytics of working with data along with publishing how-to's about choosing media, how to map visual styles and aesthetics. So the way we've sectioned how we want to kind of present what present these stories are as mentoring, curating, and making and how we got there. We started off testing the waters to see if others were interested in this field with the release of Visualizing Information 5. We could see a short guide written in collaboration with the very talented John Emerson encouraged by the positive reaction to this guide. We began to work more intensively to bring together design data and activism. We started thinking of visualization tools collecting inspiring and beautiful examples in some of the world's most creative activists and listening to the needs of grassroots groups. We took a hard look at the kinds of data NGOs and researchers were working with and why its potential was often suppressed. We followed and learned from the inspiring work of others from the fields of open data, data journalism, civic hacking, art and design. We then went further implementing our own projects, mentoring others, testing out and honing our approach and figuring out how to teach people to realize their potential as information activists. In 2009, we began mentoring two grassroots sex worker collectives in India and Cambodia to help them pull together their own data about this treatment faced by sex workers and to weave that data into information grappings to support the group advocacy needs. Together with our partners, we have explored how marginalized communities lacking access to automated information technology skills and tools can harness the campaigning opportunities within the data that they are collecting. In 2010, we started working with women's rights activists in the Arab region aiming to inspire them with examples of information design, mapping, animation, culture jamming about women's rights from around the world. We spent six months collating these examples on a blog called Visual Rights. We followed this up with a workshop for 45 women's rights advocates across the Arab world. Five went on to create their own visual campaigns. We produced a range of data visualizations for print and screen with NGO partners. For example, we worked with the anti-slavery international to create products of slavery an interactive website that visualizes data or everyday products produced in different parts of the world under conditions of slavery. Most recently we worked with Bankwatch to visualize information about environmentally and socially harmful projects being financed by the European Union. All this has added up. Over three years, we helped almost 1,000 activists working on issues as diverse as corruption, domestic violence and migration. To use evidence more effectively in their campaigns, we challenged them to figure out how to move beyond traditional, worthy reports that no one really needs. To become creative in their presentation, to be flawless in their use of evidence and to be artful in their campaigning. Okay, that's a few paragraphs in the feed. So, like I said, we're trying to tell our story and this is what came out a couple of weeks ago as an effort to continue telling that story and what I just read is a short blur from the website under the data and design how-to's that we have just started publishing. This is going to be a series of articles in the video which and we've got a couple of them up here already. A lot of it is work we have observed other people doing work we have being collaborators in and we're going to nothing do it but just reading great examples of data visualization. So, this is going to continue. There's not one and not two out there and over the next several months there will be a lot more articles which I think would be of interest to anybody who works the data and visualizing the data and everything. The other thing that we do on the website is something called visualization tools profiling where we look at tools that are commonly used by people all around and try and figure out what they're good for, what they're not good for, what the pros and cons are, what to look out for, what roadblocks might run into and I'm going to review them in profile and write about them on the website which includes use cases and examples of how this tool has been effectively used so for example, this is how it looks like it's our review and then what you can actually do with the tool and one thing we take really seriously is issues around privacy and security so we talk about how that is licensed what are the things you need to be aware of from the privacy and security point of view or with this tool and examples of work that have been done so right now we've got like and this is basically charting and graphing tools mapping tools, even basic things like design tools like tape for example which most people are familiar with but this is actually like trying to highlight use cases of how GIMP has been used for example in the individualization work that we really like and some of them link to tutorials that help you get started with tools tutorials which help you understand terminology that you might not be familiar with but we also got something called waiting room which we could use help with these are tools we have been impressed by but we haven't got around the profile yet and we'd like to so at the moment these links just lead straight out to their respective websites but those are really to be profiled by that like I said security is concern and one of our other projects called ONO Robot who's an animated robot who runs around the world telling people how to use technology securely and advices you about privacy of your data and like that so that's basically it I just wanted to show up growing by numbers.org it's a website that is going to grow as we add more content and visualizing tool profiles into it and like I said we could use help with some of that because we do actually have a little budget as an organization to do some micro grants for people who want to help us continue building this so with these details of this are still being worked on and probably will go up on the site quite soon but feel free to write to us and ask more questions about how you can help so an example could be if there is something that you want to use a specific tool to build or make and would like to present your process as a use case for one of the tool profiles that we consider stuff like that as a part of the little money we've got to give away yeah that's basically it and go home check it out growing by numbers.org just wanna pull up I don't have a presentation I never do presentations I just hate slides so I'm just gonna pull up a text editor and put up the contact details for people who wanna okay thank you very much questions alright thank you I have a transition question but it might be for any Google folks what has been to get my oh um um I don't actually use the product so I don't know you have to ask a Google but I could ask someone else and get back to you you'd be in the right place to ask that question with someone else