UN SDG Action Campaign

#MAKEOVERMONDAY, #VIZFORSOCIALGOOD & United Nations Collaboration

Makeover Monday & Viz For Social Good collaborate with the UN to support the Sustainable Development Goals Action Campaign ahead of the UN General Assembly in New York City.

Another exciting social data collaboration is underway and this time the projects #MakeoverMonday and #VizForSocialGood are working with the UN SDG Action Campaign to visualize data on people’s views on the state of poverty, inequality and climate change.

The analysis and visualizations from the #dataviz community will assist the UN SDG Action Campaign team in communicating the survey results to world leaders.

The data visualization challenge for this collaboration will kick off on Monday, 4 September and will run through to Friday 15 September.

The following sections provide an overview of the organization, the goals for the data challenge and give background to the MY World survey project. At the end of this article is a list of additional resources, including links and a webinar.

ORGANIZATION

The United Nations SDG Action Campaign is a special initiative of the UN Secretary-General administered by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and mandated to support the UN system-wide and the Member States on advocacy and public engagement in the SDG implementation.

Building on innovative and impactful engagement techniques deployed since 2002, the UN SDG Action Campaign intends to create awareness about the 2030 Agenda, empower and inspire people across the world to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while generating political will, and help make the Goals attainable by 2030. https://www2.sdgactioncampaign.org/

COMMUNICATION GOALS

The United Nations MY World 2030 survey is gathering people’s views on the state of poverty, inequality and climate change, based on where you live. The project continues on from the highly successful MYWorld 2015 project which gathered and channeled the voice of over ten million people into the deliberations of what the Goals should be.

MY World 2030 is an initiative of the UN SDG Action Campaign, UNDP and the Overseas Development Institute with thousands of additional outreach partners from UN agencies and NGOs, to youth groups and private sector companies. Data will be gathered to build up a picture of progress over the next fifteen years.

https://myworld2030.org/

GOAL

Your vote matters. The UN is working with governments everywhere to implement the ambitious set of Goals to address extreme poverty and preserve the planet. The data from this MY World survey are publicly available and open to everyone to analyse and share. These data will be presented back to world leaders and decision makers at key moments over the next fifteen years, both formally through political processes and informally through creative ‘People’s Voices’ exhibitions and films.

PROJECT

Using MY World2015 data visualizations at http://data.myworld2015.org/ and recently created MYWorld 2030 data visualisations using Tableau at http://data.myworld2030.org/ as a reference, create:

A visualization based on the pie charts in http://data.myworld2015.org to understand demographics (including disability status) of survey respondents.
A visualization for the 3rd rating question on MYWorld, “Would you say the situation on your chosen Goal has got better, stayed the same or got worse over the past 12 months?”
Any data visualization or Tableau story related to survey data which can be included in http://data.myworld2030.org/

Selected visualizations will be:

Featured on UN SDG Action Campaign social media.
Potentially featured on other communication channels. (e.g. website, publication) This will be determined and evaluated by UN SDG Action Campaign.
Selected visualizations will be presented back to world leaders and decision makers at key moments over the next fifteen years, both formally through political processes and informally through creative ‘People’s Voices’ exhibitions and films.

DATA

Kindly take the survey to understand the data: https://myworld2030.org/

Data sets:
Formats: XLS TDE TWBX

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Watch the webinar for a comprehensive introduction to the project and the various people involved and a chance to ask questions ahead of the data challenge

About MYWorld

Design Resources

Global Goals Icons

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

Sign up as a volunteer
Use the hashtags #MakeoverMonday and #VizForSocialGood on Twitter to submit your visualization(s) and a link (if applicable).
Mention @TriMyData (Eva, Makeover Monday), @VizWizBI (Andy, Makeover Monday), @datachloe (Chloe, Viz for Social Good) & @SDGaction (SDG Action Campaign), e.g. by tagging these Twitter handles in your images.

TIMEFRAME

3 September 2017: Data will be published
4 September 2017: Official start to the data challenge
15 September 2017 (11:59pm PT): deadline for submissions to Viz for Social Good and the UN SDG Action Campaign

Data and Development – A Conversation with Peoples’ Voices Challenge Winner, Popily

Throughout the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the UN Millennium Campaign had the pleasure of hosting the Peoples’ Voices Challenge Award Ceremony at the We the Peoples Hub. The Peoples’ Voices Challenge Awards is a celebration of the work of the hundreds of partners at the United Nations who gave voice to those who don’t often get a say in global conversations.

Data visualization is not normally the first thing you would think of when talking about empowering marginalized communities, but Popily is not your average data analytics firm. Popily is a data science and visualization company that lets everyday, non-technical people figure what is important from their data and share it with anyone, anywhere. The Popily team used the millions of MY World survey results and thousands of Humans of MY World Facebook page posts to generate interactive data visualizations. The public can explore these visualizations on their website, so people can discover the stories in the data that they find most meaningful. We talked to Popily Co-Founder Vidya Spandana about the role data visualization and analytics plays in the Post-2015 Agenda.

Tell us about Popily, some of the things you work on, and your goals as an organization:

Popily is a data visualization and data science company, we let people put in their data and automatically generate thousands of visualizations so that they can walk through a data set instead of being confused by a giant spreadsheet of lots of numbers. [Popily] is really there to democratize data so that people who don’t have a background or experience in science or statistics can actually engage with it in a real way. Imagine being able to walk through a visual representation, instead of just looking at a piece of paper. The more people who can do that, the more empowered they can be to make decisions on what is actually happening.

For us data is a way to see the world in an observational way with some kind of reality to it, and so for more people to have the ability to access that the better we think so that we can make collective decisions together. That aligns perfectly with the work that the [UN Millennium Campaign] is doing with MY World.

What was it that made [Popily] decide that [The MY World Survey] would be a perfect pilot project for you guys to work on?

When [CEO Jonathan Morgan] brought [MY World] on for us we were really excited because the idea of actually getting information and data about peoples lives around the world really humanizes the whole date concept and really brings our tool to life. We would actually really like to step back and let the data and the voice of the people shine and this was the best opportunity to do that.

What does this mean for Popily to win [Most Innovative Visualization] right now?

It’s extremely exciting for us, we launched officially about two or three months ago so it’s very new for us and to be able to announce partnership with the United Nations, to explore people’s data that actually has meaning has us over the moon. This is an opportunity that we’ve really been able to leverage and open up new opportunities around democratizing data. What were are more excited about is to bring data in the hands of regular people and whatever tools they need to be able to explore it.

What are some of the ways that people can actually use Popily?

Sure! You would just go to Popily.com and then there you can sign up to either upload your own data sets and explore it or there are loads of public data sets – including the MY World data set – that you can explore yourselves.

What are some of the finding you saw in the [MY World] data?

There were so many things that were really exciting. Just getting to actually look at what is in there has been sort of like a treasure that you can open up and see. One of the things that was really interesting is how education is such a priority across gender, age, and country… I also thought that is was interesting how in certain countries the younger generation… its better to reach them via paper balloting as opposed to any kind of web or mobile tools, and I would have never expected that.

What do you have planned for the future?

There’s a lot actually! We’ve been partnering with companies and organizations, especially governments and city governments, to be able to explore data that citizens would care about. So helping organizers put the data in a shape that they can make some decision on and then put it back out in the hands of regular people is really fun and is exactly what we got to do.

Visually explore MY World data with Popily

Humans of the world can now visually explore the data from the MY World global survey in new ways. Popily – a data science and visualization company — has uploaded the open data from the survey onto their site, allowing users to further investigate, discuss and understand the survey via thousands of data visualizations. The site allows for easy social sharing, allowing users to collect, comment and share the data. Popily will also partner with the UN Millennium Campaign to analyze and curate this data, providing new insight ahead of the UN General Assembly in September 2015. See Popily site

MY World is the UN Global Survey for a better world, conducted between 2013 and 2015 across the globe. The 7.7 million responses have been collected mostly from person to person paper based methods, as well as online and through SMS. Although this data is all open source, the current data visualizations allow for disaggregation by country, age, gender, income level and method of collection. Popily will now allow people to further explore the data with new ways of comparison, diving deeper into the database. Each visualization is a potential insight into the priorities, needs, and voices of the citizens that have spoken up to help guide the new UN development agenda. Continue reading “Visually explore MY World data with Popily”

Mobilizing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development

Blog by Caya Johnson, MY World Global Youth Advocate

“Data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability.
Without high-quality data providing the right information on the right things at the right
time; designing, monitoring and evaluating effective policies becomes almost impossible.”

– A World that Counts – Mobilising the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development a report by the IEAG on the Data Revolution, November 2014

In the period leading up to the adoption on the 2015 global sustainable development agenda, a revolution has been emerging at the UN – a data revolution for sustainable development.

In their report published in May 2013, the High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda called for a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development to improve the quality of information for both people and governments, for purposes including a higher standard of accountability and decision-making. The High Level Panel stressed the need for disaggregated data, specifically by gender, income, disability and other categories in order to ensure inclusivity underpins the post 2015 agenda.

In August 2014, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon appointed an Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution tasked with providing expert recommendations on how data can be used to maximum effect in the development work of the UN.

Last Thursday the group launched their report entitled A World that Counts – Mobilising the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. The report specifically recommends a global consensus on principles and standards, the sharing of technology and innovation for the common good, the dedication of new resources for data capacity development, the establishment of a UN-led Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, and the establishment of a ‘SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) Data Lab’.

The report also features the MY World Survey as an important advance in the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development– the survey has provided decision makers at the UN with disaggregated data on the priorities of people around the world. This open-source data platform has allowed for people’s voices to contribute to the informed decision-making process surrounding the new sustainable development agenda.

MY World 2015 Disaggregated Data

Want to join the global conversation on the Data Revolution?

Go to the Data Revolution We Want consultation on World We Want 2015 and share your ideas on the data revolution for sustainable development!

An Honest and Responsive Government – the Role of Citizen Voice

Blog by Caya Johnson, Global Youth Advocate

“Throughout history, progress has always been driven by citizens, who have the courage to raise their voices” – US President Barack Obama, Open Government Partnership Side-Event, 24 Sept. 2014

By empowering people around the world to have their priorities heard at the UN, the MY World 2015 Global survey has enabled a more transparent and accountable international development process – so perhaps it is unsurprising that these people have a similar aspiration for the openness and accountability of their own governments. Out of the 16 MY World priorities, “An Honest and Responsive Government” is the 4^th most voted for worldwide.

Disaggregated MY World Results on “An Honest and Responsive Governance”

Furthermore, the MY World survey indicates that in low-HDI countries people feel that governance has a very real impact on their lives. In these countries an honest and responsive government is the 2^nd most voted for priority on average, indicating that governance and poverty are indeed linked. This linkage is backed up by research carried out by Transparency International showing a clear connection between poor governance and poverty.

Continue reading “An Honest and Responsive Government – the Role of Citizen Voice”

MY World, Your Data

Recently in New York, data gurus and global development experts gathered together for a special MY World + UN Global Pulse event to explore possible ways of utilizing the MY World data set. To date, more than 645,000 people from 194 countries have cast their vote and provided incredibly useful demographic information – age, gender, education level and country. Such a rich data source presents a creative challenge to data artists and analysts to build an accessible and interactive means of exploring the information.

Continue reading “MY World, Your Data”