Building Data literacy in the voluntary sector

In August 2014, as part of our project to build data literacy in the voluntary sector on the Civic Foundry pre-accelerator programme, we organised a session during the Foundry’s massive skills share to show Civic Foundry colleagues and others how to Create and use embedded maps (on WordPress) using Google Fusion Tables.

Mike Cummins and Simon Whitehouse from the co-operative Data Unlocked designed the session and Mike came in to deliver it and share his expertise with us.

Creating Fusion Tables and populating a map

Mike showed us how to create a Fusion Table and how to populate a map using local data from the police website and data from the Land Registry website – and then how to put the map onto a WordPress site.

I didn’t get that far but others did – watch the livestream of the session and you will hear Mike’s very clear instructions and our progress.

The session was very well received, both by the colleagues in the room and the people who joined the session via the livestream. The livestream is still available – thanks to our Civic Foundry colleague Matthew Green from Policyworks.

Post-session

Mike has also published a blogpost of the session content on the Data Unlocked website which shows some of the screengrabs he used – as with all things technical, a few things have changed names since the session e.g. Google Drive now calls the red ‘Create’ button ‘New’ , and the Land Registry is now part of .gov.uk so some of the screens look different but, if you listen to the audio on the livestream, Mike clearly says which links to use.

Future sessions

We are planning to offer more sessions like this to build and improve data literacy in the voluntary sector so please contact us at RnR Organisation if you’re interested in getting involved.