Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Data Journalism Boosts Voter Registration in Kenya

Kenya's Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) published the location of voter registration centers around the country for the first time on Monday - but they released this important information as a PDF, which is fairly large to download and really difficult for ordinary citizens to read. Even professionalinfomediaries, like media and civil society organisations who gather and organize information, would only ever use a fraction of the content of the PDF.

Our pioneering Code4Kenya initiative immediately realized that the information trapped in the PDF was just too important to ignore. So, Code4Kenya's lead developer David Lemayian and one of the initiative's Data Fellows, Simeon Oriko, got to work. First, they liberated the information, by scraping the data from the PDF into an interactive spreadsheet. Then, they built the simple GotToVote! website on top of it.

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