Yesterday I co-led a “Low Tech Data” workshop at the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival with Gabi from the Tactical Technology Collective. We introduced the story types with examples and then did a quick story-finding activity. After that we ran through the presentation techniques with examples and then did a presentation technique activity. To finish, we sent folks out to test their creations with other OKFest attendees and gather feedback!
It was a quick pace, but folks had been thinking about data for the last two days so they were already in the right head-space to come along for the ride. The participants (about 70 of them) were a split between folks that do more spreadsheet-y open data stuff and those that work with communities directly around data. This made for a interesting mix of comments when we asked folks to step back and think about how they might use these activities. Some found it valuable for themselves, while others were very excited to try them out with their community partners ASAP. Overall feedback was very positive and the energy of folks finding stories and making quick things to present them was great! We didn’t get a chance to reflect on the low-tech nature of the whole process (ie. no computers involved), but it was fairly self-evident.
Here’s the presentation we used:
Here are the handouts and worksheets:
- Finding a Story Worksheets v1.1
- Picking a Presentation Technique Worksheet v1.1
- Somerville Happiness Data v1.0
Here are some of the quick things people made:
Data Therapy 
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