Category Archives: Outlets

Civio

Translated Story: Journalism first: doing advocacy with data on your side

I translated this essay by Civio Co-Director Eva Belmonte for DataJournalism.com:

Some of the best examples of data journalism are big investigations, where you spend months understanding a complex issue, discovering data where there was none or diving into huge amounts of information to find something invisible to the naked eye. Bringing new light to an issue. But to understand the complexity of this data you need time, resources, and a lot of digging. 

By the end of that odyssey, you no longer consult experts, you are the expert. And it is a waste to not take advantage of all that knowledge to try to fix the problems you encountered along the way. 

Now, you might say: “We are journalists. We are here to narrate the world, not to fix it.” 

I’m not so sure.

Read the rest of Belmonte’s essay at DataJournalism.com: [html] [pdf].

IEEE Spectrum, News

Countries Debate Openness of Future National IDs

Kenya’s High Court ruled Thursday that a recent amendment requiring citizens to register for a national biometric digital identification system overreached on some counts, such as allowing for links to DNA or GPS records, and failed to guarantee sufficient inclusion of Kenyan residents. 

The ID system, called the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS), was a homegrown answer to India’s pioneering Aadhaar system, which two years ago faced its own Indian Supreme Court ruling that upheld some components while modifying others. 

More than half of African countries are developing some form of biometric or digital national ID in response to major international calls to establish legal identification for the almost 1 billion people who now lack it. But this ID boom, also taking place outside Africa, often gets ahead of data protection laws, as occurred in Kenya. 

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