Data Journalism (May 18th 2018). Data Driven Innovation 2018. Dipartimento di ingegneria, Università degli Studi Roma Tre

1. From FOIA to opendata:
Vaccini d’Italia
riccardo.saporiti@gmail.com
@sapomnia

2. My first story about vaccines goes back to December 2014.
We already had troubles with herd immunity..

3. In order to write that story, I relied on Italy’s Health Ministry opendata..

4. ..and I was able to build this map.
Think it’s nice? Think again.
This is not detailed enough. Or at least,
it is not imho. And since I was the
author..
Let me be clear: Lombardy has 10M
inhabitants, raging from the inner city
of Milan, to the countryside in the
south, to the mountains in the north.
And I only got one vaccinal coverage
percentage for the whole region.
Once again, this is not detailed enough.
But it was the only map I could build.
Untill I felt a disturbance...

5. In december 2016, italian Freedom of Information Act came into force (get this, uh?)
A long awaited law stating the obvious that every citizen has the right to acces data detained
by governement and state agencies at all levels

6. So, I filed more than one hundred FOIA
requests (with a little help from my friends
at Diritto di Sapere).
And I was able to build this map. Which, I
totally agree, is better experienced if you
follow this link:
https://goo.gl/cWBtE4
So, everything cool, uh?
Nope, the Dark Side was still strong..

7. I mean…
Some people just didn’t answer. Even if the law states a Foia request needs to be
answered. Even if the answer is no.
Some people got scared: I was told “we don’t know if your entitled to get this data”. Or
asked “are you linked to Big Pharma”. (Really?!?)
Some people had issues with data format. I asked for something machine readable.
I exptected .csv, .xls, .ods. Instead I got .pdf (a classic..), image .pdf (wtf!), .doc
(WTF?!?) and .jpg. So, welcome to my data analysis with Gimp class…
Lesson learnt, by the way. Getting this data was quite a trouble. A trouble I decided I
didn’t want others to experience. So my editor and I decided to open them. And you can
find them on data.world here: https://goo.gl/TPq2e4 (just be nice and email me if you
use them, as some university researcher did – which made me proud).
Long story short: Foia is cool, but it’s still a long way to the top.
And yes, we wanna rock’n’roll

8. riccardo.saporiti@gmail.com
@sapomnia