On March 23-24, ″Data Literacy″ workshop was held for specialists of the Public Relations Departments of RA Government.

Among the participants there were representatives from the Ministries of Labor and Social Affairs, Emergency Situations, Transport, Communication and Information Technologies, Nature Protection, Economic Development and Investments, Justice, Defense as well as from Yerevan Municipality and the ″Public Relations and Information Center″ SNCO.

The workshop was conducted as part of a 6-month project aimed at supporting PR specialists to develop skills in data analyzing and visualizing. The project is implemented by the ″Journalists For the Future″ NGO within the framework of the US Embassy Democracy Commission Small Grants Project.

The workshop contained both theoretical and practical sessions, discussions and exchange of opinions.

Participants were introduced to the basics of data literacy in the digital era, particularly to the importance of data visualization and to how sort, process and analyze the data. They tried also to create infographics in practice.

The workshop started with the welcoming remarks by Kelli Long, the Information Officer of US Embassy Yerevan and Narek Adamyan, Deputy Director of RA ″Government Information and Analytical Center″ SNCO.

Kelli Long expressed her gratitude for the implementation of this project. According to her such projects are of great importance for establishing robust relations for cooperation and its further development. ″The skills gained during this workshop will greatly support representatives of the ministries to get more experienced in their professional activities,″ she said.

Highlighting organization of workshops in this format Narek Adamyan said, “This is a very good option of collaboration that contributes not only to obtaining new skills but also to exchanging experience which in turn will strengthen and improve the field.”

Within the framework of the 6-month project, 20 employees from PR Departments of various RA ministries and other state institutions of Armenia will have an opportunity to participate in workshops and webinars as well as to get consultation service of the organizers.

At the end of the first workshop the spokesperson and head of Information and PR Department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations Satenik Asilyan said that any kind of knowledge and experience in the state system is a necessity, and the more is the experience, the more effectively it may be used in everyday work.

″I will, surely, use the experience of making infographics which I gained here. I am going also to share these skills with my colleagues, ″ said Asilyan and added, ″one of the strong parts of the workshop was the existence of practical assignments, which enabled to use the gained skills in practice.″

She greatly evaluated the individual approach provided by the organizers to each participant.

Azatuhi Araskhanyan, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies said that she had had great expectations which were satisfied after the workshop.

She highlighted the obtained skills both in community involvement and in the stuff dissemination formats since she is the responsible person who runs the Ministry’s official pages on social platforms.

″Especially, the existence of infographics is of great importance in our work. It is a good solution in publishing the key information concisely and effectively. In fact, posts with pictures and videos are more attractive, and those running Facebook pages are well aware of it. However, the format is more important here, in this case – the format of visualization,″ said Araskhanyan.

The project director, head of the ″Journalists For the Future″ NGO Suren Deheryan said that the project was designed still in 2018 taking into account the needs among the society and trends in the digital era.

″Our team actively uses the open data of almost all of the ministries and state institutions while doing studies and preparing stories for publication on Ampop.am. And very often we face articles and/or information in unavailable formats needing additional processing and simplification. And through this project we aim at sharing our experience and skills to support our participants to be publicly more available while posting and sharing information,″ said Deheryan.

© The copyright of stories and visualizations on Ampop.am belongs to “Journalists for the Future” NGO. It is forbidden to use Ampop’s content and images without active hyperlinks to the source website. Uploading of infographics and images of Ampop.am is possible only in case of an agreement reached with JFF.

First Published: 30/03/2019