There is a central global inequality which hampers progress towards development. At the moment, we know the least about the people who have the least. But these are the people who need the world’s attention the most. Turning global or national aspirations to end poverty into real changes in people’s lives will involve knowing more about how the poorest people live, and improving their ability to access and use data.

The Cartagena Data Festival, a three day festival in Colombia, is being organised by ODI, Africa Gathering, CEPEI, Data-Pop Alliance, PARIS21, UNDP and UNFPA. The event will focus on solving critical gaps in coverage, access and analysis of data, thereby contributing to the global effort to drive progress in the post-2015 agenda.

Conference objectives:

• Drive the changes that are needed to advance a data revolution by bringing together the people and organisations whose innovations, resources, expertise and influence can make them happen
• Develop concrete solutions and practical tools to produce long term and sustainable progress through a data revolution
• Build the ideas, innovations and partnerships needed to monitor the sustainable development goals

The Cartagena Data Festival will be held at the historic Casa 1537 in Cartagena, Colombia.

Calle del colegio 34 -75 Centro Histórico
Cartagena, Colombia
Phone: + 57 (5) 647 8898.
[map & floor plan]    

Logistics Note for Participants

Map your experience!

Over three days at the festival you will have the opportunity to attend various plenary sessions, conference tracks and side events. Map your experience with the guide below to plan which sessions you choose to attend. Please note: You will have the opportunity to register for different sessions onsite but where there are limited capacities, it will be first come, first served.

REGISTRATION FOR THE CONFERENCE IS NOW CLOSED.
WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH ONLINE: PLEASE REGISTER BELOW TO RECIEVE A LINK OF THE LIVE STREAM.

Please register your interest to attend the conference. Due to limited spaces at the conference, we will confirm whether we are able to offer you a place within a week of receiving your expression of interest. Please note, if your registration is successful your conference pass to attend the two day event will be complimentary but no further costs to support participation will be covered.

Exciting content from key sessions of the Cartagena Data Festival will be live-streamed online. If you can’t join us in person, register to receive updates and join the conversation from wherever you are in the world.

Data as Culture presents We Need Us and The Future

The Cartagena Data Festival will host a cocktail reception for all attendees on the evening of Monday 20 April at the Casa 1537. This evening event will mark the opening of an exhibition featuring the Open Data Institute’s Data as Culture art programme, a Cartoon Movement ‘data cartoon competition’ and a showcase of data visualisations. A series of short introductory talks will be delivered before the evening is officially opened and participants will have the opportunity to explore for themselves the ways in which data can be used in creative, artistic and innovative ways through taking a walk around the exhibition.

We Need Us (2014) – Julie Freeman

‘We Need Us’ is a living artwork, shaped by people, and influenced by data. It is a real-time, online, animated artwork that explores both ‘life data’ and the life of data. The primary material used to create the sounds and animation in the work is metadata – data about data – which it draws from the activities of over a million people participating in the citizen science website, Zooniverse.org.

Unlike traditional data visualisation, which helps us understand and make sense of information held in large data sets, ‘We Need Us’ investigates the unique properties of the data as a whole. It asks ‘if the data had lives of their own, how would they be revealed?’ while being dependent upon the extent of human endeavour that generates the large data sets it shapes itself from. ‘We Need Us’ would cease to exist without this real-time human activity. As with much technology, people are at the heart of the process. Commissioned by The Space and the ODI. Read more.

The Future (2015) – Alicia Eggert and Safwat Saleem

‘The Future’ illuminates the overall state of peace or conflict around the world. Each light bulb represents one of the world’s 206 sovereign states; bulbs representing states at peace are lit, while bulbs representing states in conflict are unlit.

By intentionally simplifying complex issues and representing peace and conflict as binary on/off states, ‘The Future’ is designed to instigate conversations and create awareness about conflicts across the globe that affect billions of people. ‘The Future’ may look rather grim and dark at this particular moment in time, but our hope is that the project inspires people to reflect on what can be accomplished to make the world brighter and more peaceful.

Determinations regarding the peace or conflict status of individual sovereign states are made using data culled from the Institute for Economics and Peace and warsintheworld.com. Commissioned by FineActs.co. Read more.

#Dataviz winner: The Human Development Tree by Jurjen Verhagen

The Human Development Tree by Jurjen Verhagen, an engineer and interactive visualization specialist from the Netherlands, was selected today as the winner of the Data Visualization Competition organized by the Human Development Report Office for the Cartagena DataFest. He and the other two finalists, Close the Gap by Ri Liu and Visualizing the 2013 Human Development Index by InKyung Choi and her team, travelled to the Cartagena DataFest, where they received their awards on 21 April, 2015, from the Mayor of Cartagena and the Deputy Director of HDRO, in front of hundreds of data artists and scientists from around the world.

The three finalists for the Human Development Data Visualization Competition stood out for their aesthetic appeal, communications value, technique and originality. They were selected out of a large and interesting pool of submissions by a judging panel composed of data visualization experts and members of the DataFest organizing committee.

The Human Development Report Office (HDRO) received 80 submissions from 29 countries for this Data Visualization Competition. Nine of these were identified for the final round of judging by a panel of experts in data visualization and development.

Meet the finalists

The winner of the competition was The Human Development Tree, which was created by Jurjen Verhagen, an engineer and interactive visualization specialist with Zolabo, in the Netherlands. The visualization lets the user generate an Human Development Index (HDI) value which they consider acceptable as minimal life conditions. Using these values, each user gets a tree which shows how many countries have low HDI, but also shows progress over time. The visualization is strong in terms of design, as it includes three-dimensional elements and advanced use of visual components and color. It also allows the user to reflect on the human development components and how they are reflected in the HDI of different countries.

The first runner-up was Close the Gap, which was created by Ri Lui, a freelance data visualization designer from Australia who describes herself as having a passion for using data for social good. Her visualization seeks to communicate the gaps between women and men that exist around the world by exploring the facets of labour force participation, parliamentary participation, secondary education and income levels. It also seeks to highlight which countries have improved the most, and which are doing poorly in the efforts towards gender equality. The visualization intends to increase the understanding of gender gaps worldwide, and thus became an advanced analytical dashboard.

The second runner-up was Visualizing the 2013 Human Development Index, which was submitted by InKyung Choi, a spatial statistics specialist working at UNECA in Ethiopia. The work is a collective effort with Katalin Bokor, Xuan Che, Malgorzata Cwiek and Peter Njagi. The visualization consists of three interconnected parts, showing inequality, population distribution and progress in terms of HDI and its components.

Human Development Data Visualisation Competition Awards Ceremony

In the lead up to the Cartagena Data Festival, the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) ran a data visualisation competition based on its own human development data. The objective of the competition was to allow a broad cross-section of data users and artists to share their interpretation of human development data. The Data Visualisation Gala Dinner and Evening Reception will showcase the winning entries from the competition at an awards ceremony hosted at San Felipe Castillo in Cartagena. Alongside the speeches and announcements, participants will be served a 3-course meal and refreshments. The dinner is open to all participants of the Cartagena Data Festival and shuttle buses will be provided from designated pick up points following the conference and will be provided to bring participants back into town following the reception. Further details on pick up locations and timings will be provided at the conference.

Competition

THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU TO ALL FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS.

In the context of the Cartagena DataFest, the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) is organizing a data visualisation competition based on its own human development data. The objective of this competition is to allow a broad cross-section of data users and artists to share with us their interpretation of human development data. The deadline for submission is 20 March, 2015, 11:59 PM GMT. The winners will be announced in Cartagena on 21 April 2015, and finalists will be showcased in HDRO’s data visualisation gallery.

Participants will be provided 6 datasets from which to choose, along with a series of questions on which to draw inspiration. Submissions may be infographics or interactive visualisations and should provide an original and thought provoking illustration of human development.

Guidelines and submission form are available here.

Innovations are key to making the Data Revolution happen. Bright new ideas can come from all areas of data collection, processing and dissemination. But in addition to a great idea, an innovation needs a platform to get the attention it deserves. As part of the Cartagena Data Festival we are organising an Innovations Fair to showcase innovative uses of new technologies to give great ideas a global stage. Case studies from across the following areas will be showcased as part of this interactive fair:

• Data collection
• Data dissemination
• Data visualisation
• Open data initiatives
• Use of "big data"

The Innovations Fair will be open throughout the three days and participants are encouraged to come and learn more about the bright ideas that could catalyse the data revolution!

The Cartoon Movement is a global collaborative platform for editorial cartoons and comics journalism that publishes new content at least four times a week. In the lead-up to the Festival, the Cartoon Movement set up a newsroom calling for submissions of artwork relating to data and development. A showcase of 19 cartoons from this competition were showcased throughout the festival and participants were asked to vote by Tweeting their favourite cartoon.

Competition winners

We are pleased to announce the 4 winning cartoons, selected by voters at the Cartagena Data Festival and on the Cartoon Movement website. Thank you to all who participated and voted!

Please click on these winning cartoons to Tweet about them:

The UN Millennium Campaign, UNDP Colombia, and Telefonica have the pleasure of inviting participants of the Cartagena Data Festival and other distinguished guests from civil society, government, the private sector and local media to a Data Playground Reception.

Surrounded by the walls of the beautiful colonial house of Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID) in Cartagena, the event will showcase some of the innovative work on data for development already underway within the UN system and private sector.

During the cocktail reception, attendees will have the opportunity to explore an exhibition of innovative and interactive data derived from UNMC, UNDP Colombia and Telefonica that shows progress on the Millennium Development Goals, climate solutions, citizen-derived perceptions on the next development agenda and more.

Date: 22 April at 6 pm
Venue: CFCE - Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española en Cartagena de Indias Centro, Carrera 36 N° 2-74, Plaza Santo Domingo
RSVP by April 19th: emmanuel.fontalvo@undp.org