Viz for Social Good and Academics Without Borders
We are delighted to report back on our work with Academics Without Borders. Another great project has come to an end, with a total of 26 submissions in Tableau, PowerBI and R. We’re also delighted to announce the three winning entries … you can find them at the end of this blog post!
Founded in 2007, Academics Without Borders / Universitaires sans frontières are a Canadian based non-profit who look to help universities from developing nations to build the programmes, capacity and plans they need to educate the next generation of professionals and leaders. They do this using a unique model — they don’t bring people to Canada to learn there, or drop their experts in during times of crisis. Instead, they are involved in strategic initiatives that enhance the ability to develop nation universities to succeed on their own.
We had a chance to help them visualise their data as well as their model of working, and were blown away by the great standard of results.
Our participants came from Australia, Belgium, Canada, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, Poland, Singapore, UK and USA — that’s a fantastic worldwide reach! And for the virtual presentation event, once more it meant some true dedication from some of our volunteers staying up early into the wee small hours in their own time zones!
The event was recorded here — check this out to hear all about Viz For Social Good, to meet some of our team, and fifteen of our volunteers.
After the event, we it was amazing to hear from one of our presenting volunteers, Samantha Gonsalves, who gave us the following feedback:
“I just wanted to drop a note saying thank you for giving me the opportunity to present. This was my first presentation ever since I landed in Canada & I got the chance to pick up some useful tips through the vizzes. VFSG also enabled me to connect with like-minded professionals. Such good stuff!”
And we were just as delighted to hear from AWB’s Executive Director, Greg Moran, who along with the quote below, singled out our very own Vanitha Lucas for praise for her professionalism and enthusiasm.
The entire process of working with Viz for Social Good has been a pleasure, start to finish. We did not really know what to expect from the call to the volunteers at Viz. We were overwhelmed by the quality — both technical and creative — of all of the submissions.
We are looking forward to further developing the winning submissions to find them a worthy place in our communications. These outstanding visualizations will provide us with exciting vehicles to tell the AWB story in a way we have never before been able to do.
We are so grateful for the talent, passion and generosity of everyone involved in Viz for Social Good.
So who are the three winning entries? I don’t know how AWB / USF chose them from such a great pool of creative visualisations, but they have chosen the three below. Congratulations Kate, Amanda and Mariana, and thank you all so much for those who submitted and presented.
- Kate Miller
Kate’s video has to be seen to be believed — we can’t embed it straight into this blog post, but you can see it at the virtual presentation link at about 32:55 above. We’d love you to watch it all, but if you only watch 90 seconds of the recording, check out Kate’s 90 second video. Congratulations again Kate!
2. Amanda Doggett
Online interactive version here:
3. Mariana Boger Netto
Online interactive version here: https://public.tableau.com/profile/mariana.boger.netto#!/vizhome/AcademicsWithoutBorders-VizforSocialGood/AWB
We can’t thank our volunteers enough, and on a personal note I’m so pleased to see three brand new “winners” featured for the first time — three talented women from three different nations. If this has whetted your appetite, our next project has just been launched today, right here on our website, working for international non-profit Bridges to Prosperity. We’d love to have you part of our next project!
