This post is part of our series on the Open Heroines Community Events Fund, to support local or international OH meetups on gender and the intersection of data/open government/civic tech.
It was written by Juliana Galvis at DataSketch. Juliana shares the results of their first-ever Open Heroines event. It was initially published on their website.
To celebrate World Open Data Day 2020 in Bogotá we at Datasketch conducted a series of lightning talks from different organizations and individuals. Around 40 participants gathered to share stories showcasing projects around Open Data. There was a diverse group of journalists, infoactivists, researchers and data curious who gathered to share experiences, projects and learn about the data community to the heat of some shots.
We especially wanted to focus on projects about gender, and gift our participants with visualizations of information about women.
Each of the presentations lasted 5 minutes and created a space to share knowledge of projects of different open data projects in Colombia, from their use by investigative journalists, to their availability by public entities.
Participating organizations from the civil society sector such as Transparency for Colombia, Acción Social for Cali, and Objetores de Conciencia made presentations on initiatives that make information available to citizens and in turn generate results that serve other sectors to make decisions on various affairs.
One of the projects exhibited was Invisible Violence, which tells the stories of women victims of violence by members of national armed forces. This research exposes that being a woman and partner of a national armed forces can lead to a life full of privileges but also punishments, they are the ones who exercise power over their bodies and behaviors and do not skimp on attacking them when they want to. The training they receive to make legitimate use of violence is transferred to the domestic sphere, and the multiple practices of violence against them put their lives at risk.
Half of the speakers at the event were women, among them women journalists from the project Cuestion Pública and Poder from México who presented La Salud en la Mesa del Poder and Contratos.mx respectively — web specials that present information and research on conflicts of interest, revolving doors, public contracting, irregularities in contracting, corruption cases, among others.
From the public sector there was participation of a woman of the Colombian Ministry of ICT, which presented the Gov.co government platform that provides official open government data and the procedures and services that can be performed online.
At the start and end of the event we provide gifts such as stickers, notebooks, book dividers, postcards and buttons from the Datasketch Store with designs based on data visualizations on gender issues.
Such as:
According to the Ministry of Health in Colombia, 5,804 girls under 15 years were mothers in 2017. In contrast, only 146 girls were able to access a legal abortion.
Based on data provided by the Ministry of Health, Datasketch built the image of a girl, with purple dots representing the 5,804 girls under age who in 2017 were mothers, and the pink dots representing the 146 legal abortions of girls from up to 15 years old during that year.
This design above was created to inform about the countries of America that have legally approved abortion without any restriction, as is the case of Canada, most of the states of the United States (including Puerto Rico), Guyana, French Guyana, Cuba and Uruguay. This data was extracted from the World Abortion Laws site of the Center of Reproductive Rights, which have produced the map of world abortion laws since 1998.
The 8M design represents the struggle, the celebration, the alliances of hundreds of feminists organizations and activists that had come together to defend the rights conquered and those still to be achieved for all women and girls on the planet.
DataSketch is a Colombian outlet that believes in the power of data, of knowledge sharing and investigative journalism. Visit their website and follow them on Twitter.
