I am really excited about the OKF’s commitment to data.
Most data is lost, badly produced, unclear, etc. The OKFN-P2PU School of Data intends to create a new approach to education for the data-age. I’m very excited to be part of this.
Don’t have time to do more than advertise:
http://blog.okfn.org/2012/05/08/were-recruiting/
The Open Knowledge Foundation are currently recruiting for a Data Wrangler and a Data Visualisation Developer. If you’d like join our team, please visit our jobs page.
At the Open Knowledge Foundation, we build tools and communities to create, use and share open knowledge – and to help others to do the same. In recent months, we have become involved in a growing number of open data projects, and two new positions have now been created within our team.
We are seeking two data experts to join us as a Data Wrangler and a Data Visualisation Developer. Read on to find out more about what the roles involve.
Data Wrangler
We’re looking for a data wrangler who is excited to tell stories through data. You will work on various datasets, to understand them and to tell their story to a broader audience. You will also be involved in training efforts, creating and teaching courses in data analysis to technical and non-technical audiences.
Your role will be exciting and varied, and will include:
- Work on the School of Data, building learning challenges and course content (see our previous post for more information on the School)
- Research for our new data blog, coming soon.
- Collaborations with our Working Groups, for example the Working Group on Open Economics
- Work on OpenSpending, one of our flagship projects.
Skills
We are open to people from a wide variety of backgrounds; whether coding, visualisation, journalistic, statistical or otherwise. We are seeking someone who has:
- Experience in data analysis and statistical methods
- Experience with data cleansing, ETL patterns
- Good written communication skills
- Experience with R/Stata/SPSS
- Coding skill in a modern script language, e.g. Python, Javascript.
- Basic skills in information/data visualization
If that sounds like you, please visit our jobs page to find out more.
Data Visualisation Developer
As a Data Visualisation Developer, much of your time will be spent on our flagship OpenSpending project.
OpenSpending is about mapping the money. We want to make government finances accessible to advocates, journalists and citizens. Our goal is to collect budgeting information from across the world and to present it in a form that promotes understanding, analysis and participation. Some of the questions we ask are:
- How much is government spending on health? Is expenditure growing or shrinking? How does this translate into results?
- What are the proportions of different government programmes? What is spending on prisons compared to schools? How much is Ghana spending on education compared to Nigeria?
- How much tax do I pay into which area of government?
Our day-to-day work has many facets. We work on the core platform, undertake journalistic projects as part of “Spending Stories”, which won the Knight News Challenge in 2011, and work with organizations and civic activists world-wide to set up local budget transparency projects.
Your role with us
You’ll help us to create new visualizations to answer spending questions through meaningful, visual narration.
Skills we’re looking for:
- Strong visual design skills
- HTML5/Javascript visualisation experience
- Familiarity with several visualization toolkits (e.g. D3, Raphael)
- Experience with cross-browser compatibility
- Plus (but optional): Knowledge of Python
Basically: send us some demos of good stuff you’ve done.