Today, we’re very happy to launch our set of nine Responsible Data Reflection Stories: a set of stories outlining some of the unforeseen challenges faced by advocacy organisations when using data in their work.

https://responsibledata.io/reflection-stories/

We put out a call for tips for stories in July 2015, and have been following leads to produce these case studies ever since. As we outline in the Overview, we received a great deal of pointers towards potential stories, but upon further investigation, only a few of these stood up. Although there was a lot of interest around examples of responsible data challenges in other sectors, we stuck to journalism and advocacy for the purposes of this project.

A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to send in tips, or speak to us so openly and honestly about the challenges they faced. We hope that these experiences will be understood in the way that we intended them: as a contribution to our collective intelligence around how challenging using data in advocacy can be, not as a vilification of those who have been honest about those challenges.

If you have other stories you’d like to share, or if you have any feedback or questions about these stories, please feel free to email us – zara@theengineroom.org or tom@theengineroom.org – or join the Responsible Data mailing list to share your comments with the community more broadly.

The content is all licensed under a Creative Commons Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA 4.0) – so, please feel free to repost or re-use the content.