We caught up with the winner of the second round of the On Think Tanks Data Visualisation competition about their inspiration and experience creating the winning piece.

Visualising the Past, Present and Future of Carbon Emissions, an interactive visualisation by Bill Dugan at the World Resources Institute, USA, is an innovative concept that had big impact. We spoke to Bill about his team’s inspiration for the graphic and his advice for anyone else looking to use interactive visuals to tell a story. 

We caught up with the winner of the first round of the On Think Tanks Data Visualization competition about their inspiration and experience creating the winning piece. Don’t limit HER possibilities, a static visualization by Eric Barrett at JumpStart Georgia, won round the judges with its original use of photography and creative manner of telling the story about STEM education for girls in Georgia. We wanted to unpack Eric's motivation for the graphic, the origins behind its unusual style and some of the challenges they faced during the process. 

Yet there may be another way that think tanks can spread their ideas to drive real change. We think this could begin by showing and not just telling. Instead of drafting policy papers describing how systems ought to work, think tanks should consider building software and data visualizations that demonstrate how systems can and do operate in practice. This is not as hard as it sounds -- there are some tried and tested steps worth considering.

After the end of the On Think Tanks Data Visualisation competition, we were able to catch up with the winner of the Third Round as well as the final overall winner of the competition, Michal Tošovský. Michal led the team at Otevrena spolecnost, o.p.s. -- a Czech think tank focusing on police and public security -- that is behind Mapping Czech Crime, a visualisation that we think does what it says on the tin and does it well!

The other week I had the good fortune of participating in an excellent meeting in Prague hosted by the Open Society Foundations: Policy Research, Technology and Advocacy Event @ the Hub. The event was designed to bring experts together from across Central and Eastern European think tanks to share ideas and learn from each other on innovative approaches to evidence-based advocacy and communications.

For the 2nd Round of the On Think Tanks Data Visualisation Competition, we had a completely different style of winner: the Budapest Institute submitted a poster called ‘Our Money’ that broke down the Hungarian annual budget so that it was easy for any citizen to understand. It was the subject of heated debate among the judges – especially the origins of the visualisation – so I thought I’d ask its creators, Petra Edina Reszkető, Balázs Váradi and Anna Orosz more about the posters and the project that brought them to fruition.

We’ve been continuing to scour the web for resources to help think tanks develop data visualisations and to get their ideas across to new audiences. A lot of the resources we found were designed to help with the technicalities of developing visualisations themselves. But we were intrigued when we came across SwayWhat, a tool that not only helps create charts, but also serves as a platform to share ideas. If I had to describe it in a sentence, it’s SlideShare for data visualisations – but it’s more ambitious for that. It hopes to bring evidence to the most political of discussions. I had to find out more, so I got in touch with SwayWhat CEO, Noah Blumenthal, to understand better how think tanks might take advantage of their services.

Round 3 of the On Think Tanks Data Visualisation Competition is currently open for submissions(the deadline is 20 November at 23:59 GMT!)! The judges want it to be the biggest and the best round we've had so far so each of them has taken a minute to offer their advice when it comes to data visualisation -- what works, what doesn't, and what are they really looking for when judging the data visualisations. Today we hear from John Schwartz.