MEDSTAT IV is supporting the MED countries in developing new and innovative dissemination tools that are more relevant for communicating through the social media
All the MED countries are confronted with a rapid evolution of the way users are considering and “consuming” statistics. In particular, the development of the social media has put additional stress on the Statistics Offices who have to radically adjust their communication and dissemination practices to a rapidly changing environment. There is a general sense that data must be made more attractive, by using animation, and more easily accessible to all users, by going through on line products.
These adjustments require resources that are not often available in the statistical offices, particularly in a time of budget restriction. The development of data visualisation products also requires technical capacities, such as the ones of designers and of communication experts, which are rare assets in statistical offices.
The participants in a recent regional workshop organised by MEDSTAT IV (Lisbon – February 21-22, 2018) concluded that there was a good case to make for a regional pooling of resources, for sharing investment and for exchanging experiences in this area. They asked MEDSTAT IV to initiate a regional exercise with the aim of assisting the development of country experiences with data visualisation, sharing the results of these experiences within the region as to draw lessons and potentially replicate the best practices.
Five countries (Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia) have already set-up national teams composed with several capacities that need to be pooled in order to design data visualisation for statistics: statisticians, economists, designers, IT specialists, communication specialists. They defined the products (infographics, animated graphs and tables, videos …) that they wanted to develop around a theme (Inflation, Disability, gender gap …) a message (how the price index is calculated, what difficulties faced by disabled children for accessing education, Domestic violence against women …) and sets of data.
MEDSTAT IV will accompany the national team in their project and will provide technical assistance when and where necessary. The various experiences will be shared and discussed at the occasion of a regional workshop that will take place early 2019. From this exchange, lessons will be drawn and good practices will be identified that will contribute to increasing the knowledge in the region on data visualisation.
To know more, please contact MEDSTAT4@MEDSTAT4.fr
