Viz For Social Good and Kiron — #AmplifyNow
Last month, we were invited by our partners Kiron to present at their #AmplifyNow conference https://virtualrefugeeconference.com — a two day event timed around International Refugees Day on June 20th.
Kiron are a Berlin based NGO which provides refugees worldwide and underserved communities in the Middle East access to high-quality education. We had already worked with them in Berlin in 2019 at the Tableau Conference — this had been an amazing opportunity to run a live event and introduce Viz for Social Good to a whole new audience while creating data visualisations that Kiron could make use of to visualise their student details.
So when they contacted us this year we were delighted to partner up again. Of course, times are very different, and in-person events of 2000+ data people were already distant memories. This time the plan was to be able to create visualisations that we could then display and present at their online conference, to show the power of data storytelling to amplify stories about refugees and migrants. Our session’s title was to define our brief: Visualising Data to Tell New Migration Stories. Having led the session in 2019, Amanda and Neil (above, front right) would return to lead the session in 2020, albeit this time from their homes in UK and Netherlands.
We didn’t want to miss such a good opportunity to be part of Kiron’s conference, nor to miss out on a chance for our participants to be part of a great event and present their work in a conference environment. But timescales were tighter than usual. We could only give our volunteer participants two weeks at the most to create their visualisations from start to finish, in order to select those to participate on the day and give everyone time to take part. Would that be enough time for a high number of quality stories to tell?
We needn’t have worried, our volunteers did us so proud. We had an amazing 25 high quality visualisations, all great designs full of storytelling detail, any of which would have been worthy to present. But here are the five that Kiron chose, presented below in no particular order. These really showed the range (geographical and otherwise) of the stories we were able to tell through data. Thank you especially to our participants — four of whom were able to present at such short notice, despite two of our team taking part at 2am in Australia (thank you Ashish and Darragh!)
1. Annie Britton: COVID-19 Cases and Migrant Populations by Country
2. Rob Radburn (with huge thanks to Amanda Patist for presenting this live in his absence): Where migrants came from and went in Africa
3. Louise Shorten: Direct Provision in Ireland
4. Ashish Chopra: Internal Displacement
5. Darragh Murray: Refuge from the Storm
Thank you also to Kiron for running a “people’s vote” — in addition to the event at the conference, our social media channels and theirs promoted a vote for the most popular / favourite viz. Congratulations to Soha for her crowd-sourced winning visualisation, which you can see below.
Inspired to take part in a Viz for Social Good project? Check out https://www.vizforsocialgood.com/join-a-project/awb where you can volunteer for our latest project which closes on August 14th 2020.
