The popular infographic creator Infogr.am launches Ambassador Program to enhance data literacy on a local level all over the world.
The ambassadors will help in spreading data literate practices while organising workshops and webinars in collaboration with local communities of journalists, activists, communication officers and young leaders.
“For there to be a demand for data products, there has to be a strong base of data literacy. Otherwise it’s like selling printing presses to the illiterate. It’s not just a waste of time, but it’s actually ignorant,” Infogr.am COO Mikko Järvenpää said at DataWeek + API World 2014 conference in San Francisco.
Currently there are 18 ambassadors coming from 10 different countries all around the world. They represent such organisations as Open Knowledge, Internews.org, ICIJ, Wikidata, Open Steps, Hacks/Hackers and others.
The Ambassador Program is launched on Infogram.org, a new openly available site that aggregates all the educational resources available to get the most out of the easy to use infographic creator.
The site also features the best infographics produced during the Data Storytelling workshops, the global satellite events where essentials of effective data storytelling are shared. “The workshop was a great introduction to using data for storytelling for all of our attendees whose experience varied extremely,” says Infogr.am Ambassador Hannah Williams, “I’m happy to say that some attendees are continuing on their data storytelling journey and have already produced some other visualisations. The ease of use that Infogr.am offers is really empowering.”
Nika Aleksejeva, the Chief Community Manager at Infogr.am, calls for passionate data storytellers from all over the world to join the Ambassador Program: “Just like literacy is the ability to both write and read, data literacy is the ability to both visualise and read the visualised data. It’s one of the basic skills necessary to produce relevant datadriven content that can change things for the better. I encourage communicators all over the world to join this movement for global data literacy.”
About Infogr.am
Infogr.am is a web-based data visualisation software for non-designers. It is used by over 1.3 million journalists, activists, communication professionals, teachers, students and other individuals worldwide, including The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, Amnesty International and many others.
