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This Open Data Day, Sign Up to Design Icons at Our Election Iconathon!

by Michelle Brown in Washington, DC
Democracy and Technology Elections All Regions 
Sample election day infographic
Sample election day infographic from citizen observer organization used by PACE during Burma’s 2015 parliamentary elections. Click on image to view full infographic
  • Sample election day infographic
  • Sample election day infographic
  • Election infographic
  • Election infographic

Calling all open data, design, and democracy nerds in the Washington, DC area!

First off, happy Open Data Day. To celebrate this day of data liberation, we at NDI’s Open Election Data Initiative invite you to to participate in our Election Iconathon event on Saturday, March 19th where we will create icons that bring election data to life. Slots are filling up fast, so we encourage you to sign-up using this form before they’re all gone. Throughout our work we've found that images, often through infographics, can tell memorable stories about elections. So we'd like to invite you to help us create icons that will do justice to the data our election monitoring partners collect and publish.

The Iconathon will convene elections experts, graphic designers, and interested citizens around Washington, DC to create icons that represent different parts of an evaluating an election (e.g. the accessibility of a voter registration center). In essence, it’ll be a "hackathon" for graphic designers and elections/democracy enthusiasts. (The concept for Iconathon was inspired by the work of The Noun Project, of whom we are fans.)

As part of NDI’s support to citizen election observers around the world, we’ve worked with talented graphic designers to develop a strong set of icons focused on election day. With e-day in the bag, our upcoming Iconathon event will target the period before election day. Icons designed (or really doodled) by participants will be used by election monitoring organizations around the world, free of charge, in their electoral advocacy and outreach efforts. These citizen groups systematically collect and analyze election data, and their findings can tell powerful stories about the credibility of their countries' polls. For example last October, NDI assisted one of Burma's first election monitoring organizations (PACE) to assess the quality of their country's first democratic election in decades. During Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election, a parallel vote tabulation by citizen observers (TMG) verified the opposition party’s historic victory and contributed to peaceful acceptance of the results.

If this event sounds interesting to you, don’t hesitate to sign up here! By March 10th, we’ll let you know if you secured a slot, or landed on our waitlist.

Acknowledgement: Sunila Chilukuri