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<article id="about">
  <header>
      <h1 class="article-header">About Wazimap</h1>
  </header>
  <section>
      
      <p>
          Wazimap, from the Xhosa word ulwazi for knowledge, is a joint project by 
          <a href="http://www.mediamonitoringafrica.org/">Media Monitoring Africa</a> 
          and <a href="https://www.openup.org.za/">OpenUp</a> that provides easy access 
          to <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/">South African census</a> and 
          <a href="http://www.elections.org.za/">elections</a> data.
      </p>

      <p>
          Read more about <a href="https://wazimap.co.za/about">who we are and why we built Wazimap</a>.
      </p>
          
      <h2 class="subhead">Shoulders of Giants</h2>
          
      <p>
          Wazimap is based on the amazing <a href="https://censusreporter.org/">Census Reporter</a> 
          and is completely open source. You can <a href="http://wazimap.readthedocs.io/en/latest/">
          build a Wazimap for your own country.</a>
      </p>

      <h2 class="subhead">Why Wazimap? A brief history.</h2>

      <p>
          Since our first democratic elections in South Africa,
          <a href="http://mediamonitoringafrica.org">Media Monitoring Africa (MMA)</a> has
          monitored the media’s coverage in the run up to the elections. While our media are
          overwhelmingly fair we have found a general tendency across all the media monitored
          (on average 50 different media titles for each period) to have their elections agenda
          set by political leaders and political parties contesting. With some clear and often
          excellent exceptions that prove we have quality journalism, the news on offer tends to
          be event based, and fails to focus on the bigger issues we face.
      </p>

      <a href="http://elections2014.mediamonitoringafrica.org/">
          <img
              class="pull-right"
              src="http://elections2014.mediamonitoringafrica.org/img/logo-top-left.png"
          />
      </a>

      <p>
          Despite issues of labour, unemployment, crime, health, education challenges,
          transformation, sustainability, land, racism, xenophobia, poverty, inequality,
          gender-based violence and child abuse being so prevalent, we see that each of these
          issues receive less than 2% of coverage. For a more comprehensive overview of the 
          challenges in coverage and positive trends see our interactive elections analysis 
          of the 2019 national elections at 
          <a href="https://mediamonitoringafrica.org/elections.mediamonitoringafrica.org/2019/#/">
          mediamonitoringafrica.org/elections.mediamonitoringafrica.org/2019</a>.
      </p>

      <h2 class="subhead">Journalism Tools</h2>

      <p>
          We are also aware of the many challenges faced in our newsrooms with shrinking
          budgets, and fewer journalists being expected to produce more and more stories. The
          questions we sought to answer included how to disrupt elections coverage and promote
          stories that cover issues. How could we help journalists get reliable factual
          information to back up and give context to stories? How could we help media unpack the
          different political dynamics in different hot spots? And finally how could we help
          media see elements of how they cover elections?
      </p>

      <a href="http://www.newstools.co.za/"
          ><img
              class="pull-right"
              src="http://www.newstools.co.za//assets/img/logo_newstools.png"
              style="width: 200px; height: auto"
      /></a>

      <p>
          We had through our work on
          <a href="http://www.newstools.co.za/">NewsTools (Churnalism and NewsDiffs)</a> already
          started focusing on how to make better use of data and explore data journalism. We had
          an idea that we could try and mash data from the census carried out by Stats SA
          together with elections results and media coverage. What we were not sure about was
          how we could do this.
      </p>

      <p>
          In a great moment of serendipity, during a break at a Hack Hackers event in
          Johannesburg, our Director William Bird met up with Adi Eyal from
          <a href="https://openup.org.za/">OpenUp</a>. A brief chat and sparkle in Adi’s eyes
          said he was sure we could do something. He showed us his data journalism work (at that
          point looking at municipal issues in Cape Town) and we showed him ours (our elections
          coverage and NewsTools) and agreed that we could take our engagement forward.
      </p>

      <p>
          Our one challenge was to raise the funds necessary, not only to build a new tool but
          also to help us update and upgrade our online media monitoring capacity. We used the
          national general elections in 2014 as our focal point. Our application to the Open
          Society Foundation for South Africa was successful and which meant we were able to
          start to realise our new vision for MMA.
      </p>

      <h2 class="subhead">Census Reporter</h2>

      <a href="http://censusreporter.org/"
          ><img
              class="pull-right"
              src="http://censusreporter.org/static/img/logo.png"
              style="width: 200px; height: auto"
      /></a>

      <p>
          A series of meetings and discussions between William, Wellington Radu (MMA head of
          programmes) Adi and then Greg Kempe (more about him shortly) resulted in the
          beginnings of a prototype. Through their networks and exposure, Adi and Greg
          identified an amazing tool that we could adapt, localise and replicate -
          <a href="http://censusreporter.org">Census Reporter</a>. Census Reporter was created
          in the USA as a Knight News Challenge project and was built by
          <a href="http://censusreporter.tumblr.com/people"
              >Joe Germuska, John Keefe, Ryan Pitts, Ian Dees and Sara Schnadt</a
          >.
      </p>

      <p>
          Thanks to Census Reporter we already had an incredible tool to base Wazimap on. A huge
          amount of work still had to take place with localising, bringing in our own data,
          adding our own additional elements, including using the map as the basic point of
          entry to the data. By mashing census, elections and media data we had taken an amazing
          idea and developed it even further.
      </p>

      <h2 class="subhead">Wazimap</h2>

      <a href="http://wazimap.co.za/"
          ><img class="pull-right" src="{% static 'img/wazi-logo.png' %}"
      /></a>

      <p>
          The name Wazi is derived from the IsiXhosa word “ulwazi” for knowledge which we
          believed resonated with the aim of Wazimap. It was thanks largely to the coding
          brilliance of Greg and Adi that that we were able to get a version of Wazimap up and
          running before our elections in May 2014. Each time we added on requests for new
          information Greg would work his magic and the results would appear.
      </p>

      <p>
          Wazimap has already proven to be so successful that it is being adapted again for
          Kenya and Nigeria by OpenUp and we have more great things for Wazimap planned.
          <a href="http://wazimap.co.za">Play with Wazimap now</a>.
      </p>
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