 Hi there my name is Glenn McGregor. I'm a reporter with the Ottawa Citizen and along with David Mackay my colleague from CBC We're going to be leading a two-day workshop on using data to tell stories This is our third year teaching this course. We've had great response in the past couple of years It's aimed at journalists people who are working communications. Maybe people with charities NGOs anyone who who needs to get their message out and communicate stories to a larger audience Increasingly governments are keeping all their records in electronic form. So in order to work with this these kinds of data you need to be Literate with things like Microsoft Excel. You should learn how to use electronic maps Like ArcGIS and QGIS. You should learn to use big data sets. We're going to teach you all those skills You don't have to worry what kind of level you're at if you're a complete beginner or if you've had experience before We've adjusted the course accordingly. So it's going to be The real emphasis is going to be on finding the stories within the data because the technical part is only a little bit of it You've got to once you get to learn those technical skills But then you got to learn to look for the things that are significant in data That will be important for your organization to communicate to your audience. So it's a lot of fun over two days We have a great time playing around with all kinds of data sets and We really hope that you can make it out and sign up for the course