OKFestival

As the digital landscape evolves, sensors are bridging the virtual world with the physical world and opening the door to a whole new kind of storytelling. While still nascent in practice, a trend called “sensor journalism” is growing as journalists experiment with new technology and tools to gather information and expand on knowledge about environmental factors like air quality, water quality, and even urban sound design.
The emergence of sensor journalism is an opportunity to cultivate a culture of experimentation, engage new audiences, build communities within crowdsourcing, and democratize the storytelling process.

This session is designed to help non-artist professionals with the process of how to think creatively to convey your information or message. A team of Nairobi-based graffiti artist-activists will help you in building strong concepts and narratives through visual and street art. Also, we will discuss how to work in collaboration with artists to reach your audiences. Be prepared with your info, in all its complexities. It will be a hands-on, iterative workshop, but you don't need any artistic background.

Hashtags: #OKFestGraffiti #OKFestAWAC

This year, Artists Without a Cause have helped to coordinate this session and we’re grateful to them for bringing these artists' work to our attention and helping to organise their presence at the festival. This session remains editorially independent.  

This year, Making All Voices Count are supporting this session and we’re grateful to them for making this conversation possible at the festival. This session remains editorially independent as it was put together in consultation with the Programme Team following the same guidelines as for other sessions at the festival. For more details about programme sponsors see our Sponsors page.     

Data journalism has tremendous potential to drive transparency and uncover corruption in developing countries and many donors are funding data journalism as a means to good governance and transparency. But what does it take to grow a sustainable data community? Can we evaluate the most common strategies: conferences, boot camps, fellowships, hackathons and reporting grants and evaluate which have produced concrete data journalism that have had a social and policy impact? Did they lead to growth of the data communities needed to provide technical support to journalists? How do we measure things like engagement, policy impact and shifts in media culture in a traditional media environment where online analytics are of little use? What are the minimum data, technology, and media requirements for data journalism initiatives to be viable? Are we honest with donors about how much can be accomplished under different conditions?

How the session will be structured
Debate and discussion: I would like each participant to share one success and one failure in projects to foster data journalism in a developing country and how they measure success and failure. Then we will develop a list of essential elements for different types of interventions and come up with a list of best practices.

Session hashtag: #OKFestDDDJ 

Do you have something to say, information you are trying to get out?

This session will bring together participants to convey messages through music and creative means.

Contribute your issue and expertise, and work together to distill complex ideas into a singular message, through music. We will go through a process of thinking creatively. How does everyone's work fit into one collective picture? Build narrative, through creating music. Through collaborative music techniques, Juliani and Valsero will help stitch the ideas together, simply and effectively. They will also explain how they have done this before in the Kenyan and Cameroonian context.

You do not need any prior music experience! If you are a musician, we'd also love for you to join and collaborate.We hope to create music during this session. But everyone will leave with an understanding of how to use creative methods in knowledge / data activism, to reach audiences, conceptualize complex issues, and to package your info or messages effectively. And how to work through collaborative processes -- with musicians and artists -- to do so.

Will be in English and French

Hashtags: #OKFestMusic #OKFestAWAC

This year, Artists Without a Cause have helped to coordinate this session and we’re grateful to them for bringing these artists' work to our attention and helping to organise their presence at the festival. This session remains editorially independent.  

People tend to look for answers in data. Art made with data looks for new questions. This is a session about leaving open data a little open-ended. We're going to talk about different ways to ask questions with data, then look at some datasets and ask some questions about them.

We are artists who work with public datasets. Because we don’t work in a campaign or policy context, our approach to using data is more concerned with questions than answers. We want you to ask better questions and tell better stories.

• Introduce our work, way of working with data--idea of using one dataset to tell many narratives.
• Provide the group with a sample dataset: (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Speed-Camera-Tickets/3nky-hkft)
• Ask group to offer up questions about the dataset. Discuss ways of presenting the data, the types of questions different methods of presentation might bring up.

While it's great to have lots and lots of data, and lots of different kinds of data, it's easy to lose sight of how much can be learned just by focusing on and interrogating a single dataset. Our work is based on open questions rather than easy answers. This session emphasizes using open data to open multiple narratives.

Hashtags: #OKFestArt #OKFestAWAC

This year, Artists Without a Cause have helped to coordinate this session and we’re grateful to them for bringing these artists' work to our attention and helping to organise their presence at the festival. This session remains editorially independent.  

Human beings have told stories for many centuries. These stories have in many ways shaped who we are, the world we live in and the lives we live. Our ancestors used stories to transfer knowledge to generations that came after them.
Through telling stories, our ancestors found better ways to communicate and express themselves.
The Storytelling for Social Change will use the “what happened” methodology to tell stories that educate, engage and inspire change. Storytelling is no doubt a tool used widely in marketing, fundraising, day-to-day communication and social change (activism).
However, storytelling can only work effectively if one uses the right methodology to tell their stories in a powerful way.
In this session, participants will be introduced to the principles of storytelling and also get a chance to tell their stories and listen to each other’s stories.
We shall also briefly explore creative ways of documenting and sharing our stories.

The session will be very interactive. Every participant of this workshop (if NOT more than 20) will be given an opportunity to tell a story in 2 minutes- during this time, other participants will be listening.
Participants will also take turns to work as dedicated listeners, time keeper or even play any other active role.


Session hashtag: #OKFestStory 

Looking for creative ways to find and present data stories in low-tech settings? We will share our hands-on, participatory techniques for bringing people together around data to find and tell powerful stories without computers. You'll walk away with skills and ideas to help the communities you work with!

Working with data can empower or disempower. Algorithms, technical language, unfamiliar processes - these all leave many communities incapable of working with data, or understanding data-driven discussions. Most folks don't "speak data".

We've developed and tested a set of hands-on activities that introduce finding stories in data to communities. Help us tweak them, give us your insights and experience, and lets all learn from each other!


Session hashtag: #OKFestLowTechData 

As the digital landscape evolves, sensors are bridging the virtual world with the physical world and opening the door to a whole new kind of storytelling. While still nascent in practice, a trend called “sensor journalism” is growing as journalists experiment with new technology and tools to gather information and expand on knowledge about environmental factors like air quality, water quality, and even urban sound design.

Questions this session will explore:
1. What is sensor journalism, and who is doing/has done it?
2. How is sensor journalism related to and different from data journalism?
3. How could open networked sensors potentially enrich storytelling?
4. What are some ways that journalists approach the issue of data quality? 

Session hashtag: #OKFestSensorJ