Founder and Director of Datastory.org and Datastory Tech. Background in medicine, data visualization and global development. Full-stack developer‚ data journalist and open data practitioner. Right now? Building a platform aimed at 1+ billion users. 🚀
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Today, I lead two teams of digital professionals at Datastory NGO and at Datastory Tech. With expertise across a broad range of fields, we build long-lasting and impactful digital tools that educate and inspire.
This journey began when I – as a teenager in the late 90s – started programming and became involved in different progressive movements to promote justice and peace. Technology, through "creative coding", became a way to express ideas and help organizations create simple websites.
Following a stint of medical studies, I found my calling when I first watched Hans Rosling's world renowned 2006 TEDTalk "The Best Stats You've Ever Seen". Seeing global development trends presented with such clarity had a profound effect on me, and I soon found myself e-mailing Hans Rosling to apply for a volunteer or work position at the Gapminder Foundation. A summer job became almost four years of daily collaboration with this civic educator legend and Hans became a fantastic mentor to me in everything from "interpreting statistics" to "seeing the bigger picture" and "thinking like an epidemiologist".
Hans Rosling
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/c74b76aa-92a7-436e-acc5-c434adc05bd7/Gapminder_work_certificate.pdf
– Hans Rosling, Chairman of Gapminder Foundation and Professor of International Health
During my time at Gapminder I developed experience leading digital projects and collaborating with international organizations. I got to travel to many parts of the world, collaborating with TEDTalks, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google.org, BBC as well as statistics agencies and the United Nations.
I left Gapminder in 2012 to travel the world. On return to Sweden I applied for a job at Swedish TV (SVT) to develop more experience in the up-and-coming field of data journalism. Together with Kristofer Sjöholm and colleagues we pioneered new methods and won the Nordic Data Journalism Award for our work on visualizing income distribution.
– Kristofer Sjöholm, Project Leader, SVT, Swedish national public television broadcaster
Kristofer Sjöholm
During this time (2013-2017) I also worked as a project leader for the IFRC and the Brookings Institution as well as different statistics agencies and health quality registers, gaining more insight into the user experience and tech stacks of data-driven platforms.
Rania Alerksoussi
– Rania Alerksoussi, Coordinator, Strategy and Knowledge Department, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
In 2017, I founded Datastory with the goal of educating on a global scale. Our mission is captured in these brief sentences: "Important issues. Powerful tools. Free for everyone."
At Datastory we're employing user-centered design and data visualizaton to tackle the complex challenge of making meaningful and lasting pedagogical tools from the vast amount of open, but scattered, data available today.
– Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Global Economy and Development, The Brookings Institution
Homi Kharas
Meanwhile, Lapidus Interactive AB and Datastory are also working in partnership with many high-profile Swedish and global organizations – such as SKR, Södertörn University, Vinya Technologies – to do good with data. These projects explore new frontiers of data visualization, interaction design, ontology development and other fascinating processes and technologies.
Code: JavaScript, React, NextJS, Angular, D3, Git
Design/UI: Figma, Sketch, Adobe CC
APIs: GraphQL, REST
Open data: Protégé
DevOps: Amazon Cloud, Heroku, Google Cloud, Airflow
Data science and statistics: Python/Jupyter Notebooks, R, Scraping
Analytics: Google Analytics etc.
Other experience: Realflow, Cinema 4D, Screenflow