Anna Kakalashvili, 21, Georgia

Currently Anna is working as a Human Rights Lawyer´s Assistant at the Human Rights Education Monitoring Centre in Georgia and blogs for the Georgian Young Greens.

Data and Journalism in Georgia
The only way not to get lost in jungles of data is data journalism

Words like “Open Government”, “Open Data” are still unfamiliar for many Georgians. Especially for those who still remember brutal soviet censorship and inaccessibility of any data possessed by government. Over 20 years have passed since the Soviet Union has collapsed: now we have websites like data.gov.ge (state owned) or opendata.ge (civic) where citizens have access to different information.  Open data policy has been implemented in Georgian legislation; citizens and organization have right to request any public information from any public institutions.

However the Georgian government missed the fact that many people cannot easily adjust to digital era where everything is online. It’s because they either can’t use or don’t have access to Internet which makes many of their (governments) effort useless. And even if it has nothing to do with Internet, those are only NGO’s who are requesting information from public institutions and not citizens. There are only few organizations that are dealing with data visualization and few journalists that are creating stories out of existing data.

In Georgia, we didn’t have any prominent whistleblower like Chelsea (Bradley) Manning or Edward Snowden who could have made data journalism functioning. However, much information is leaking though web but journalists are rarely making any (good) stories out of that.  

Reason for that is simple. Data journalism is something new, not only for Georgia but also for the whole world. It has a lot to do with technologies, Internet and times we are living in right now.  A lot of people, including journalists find it hard to adjust to the digital era or as we may call it - the era of Big Data.  

Yet, the Era of Big Data is already our everyday life. Each day we exchange huge amount of data. We can’t keep a track of all this information and that’s why much of important information is just leaking away from our hands. It’s like throwing away money because you don’t know how to treat it properly. But in case of journalists, the currency is information.

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