Postdata.club team is focused on trying to develop new topics for doing journalism that matters, using open, public and accessible data.
Cuba discussed a new constitution, finally approved last April. From data journalism, we covered that political situation. For the constitution to be approved it was necessary to discuss people’s opinions and we created the only data app with this purpose. In the way of a digital space, an including a tool for comparing the project with the previous constitution article by article, we gave cubans the opportunity to express themselves article by article while also sawing the opinions of experts who joined the debate in the app. This way it was possible for people everywhere to attend the debates and decide their vote considering the ideas that came out of the analysis we published. Using this tool more than 700 actions related to the constitution project were proposed. To accompany the debate, other articles were created on topics focused on the main issues around the constitution such as those related to same-gender marriage, presidential periods, voting outside Cuba and how constitutions are reform in other countries.
We also created a work related with cuban internal migration that had a great reception. We were able to produce the most complete work of Cuba inner migration based on 16 stories, one for each cuban province, 14 audio testimonies, more than 55 interactive graphs including 16 maps. Here we also experiment with sonifications creating 16 of them, one for each province based on internal and external migration rates.
Another work was a data app to identify municipality differences in Cuba. For this we used AI algorithms to identify, without bias, groups of municipalities base on crossing different characteristics reported by official institutions. .Here we approach the idea of audio-telling: we used an audio story and at the same time we created interactive animations that shows our insights and how to use the tool, and in every moment the users were able to interact with the app exploring concepts and ideas that the audio describe.
We also cover another issues related with gender gaps, the effect of movies like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the government composition among others.
These works were recognized in different spaces. We were shortlisted in the RELE Awards in its first editions, because of our efforts for using and opening data from the government. Postdata.club members published a chapter in the Data Journalism Handbook 2nd edition. This chapter was about data searching in a country with a lack of public and open data. Our team was invited, for second year, as speaker to the Latin-American Congress of Investigative Journalism to share our experience covering how was the political power behavior through the last year. For third year in a row we were shortlisted at the Data Journalism Awards. This year we are shortlisted in 3 different categories: “Student and young data journalist of the year,” “Best data journalism team portfolio (Small newsroom)” and “Data journalism website of the year”.
