TASCHA at Global Election Technology Summit

TASCHA’s Chris Rothschild will be presenting Thursday, May 18th at the Global Election Technology Summit. Along with James Long and Nic Weber, University of Washington faculty members collaborating on the Data for Democracy project, the presentation, “‘Push, Pull, Spill’: Election Data and Citizen Engagement in a Global Context,” will focus on the election processes and data in Myanmar and citizen reporting on campaign and election events in South Africa. The team will highlight three areas where government ministries, local NGOs, citizens, and their research have attempted to gather information about local data needs, and translate those needs into actionable programs that residents and organizations in the countries can use to support data for decision making:

  1. The challenges of creating, publishing, and displaying meaningful data visualizations for audiences with varying data literacies;
  2. The ‘faith-based’ nature of trust in demographic data; and,
  3. The challenges associated with making data meaningful in an age where digital information is viewed on both computers and mobile technologies

Chris and James will also be participating in the “Leveraging Data for Democracy Around the World,” a panel to discuss how data is being used to make democracy more open, transparent, and accessible. His work and experience in Myanmar illuminates how one of the world’s newest democracies, absent the constraints of legacy systems, has been able to explore new approaches to how data is collected, used, and made accessible to citizens.