VizRisk Challenge Entry

I love playing Softball and I‘m playing for more than 10 years now, it is a great team sport and I love the mix of action, team play and personal challenge getting up 1 vs. 1 against the pitcher. I used to coach the women’s team of the town that I studied in and was asked again to coach my team here in Berlin. I love coaching a team sport, strategizing how to approach the game and most important see players improve over time. Practice makes perfect and I love to practice and challenging myself to get better at something and to challenge the other players to get better and teach them what I learned over the years.

This is one of the reasons why I want to challenge myself and will enter the Viz Risk challenge from the Understanding Risk (UR) Community and GFDRR in partnership with Mapbox and the Data Visualization Society.

Details can be found here

Why? Practice makes perfect. :)

I always wanted to enter a visualization challenge and this seems to be a perfect time and the right mix of Partners and datasets.

Practicing my skills is an important part of working for yourself. I do it regularly, but I do not often share my results and my process in the public. I should be doing more of it and this is one of many efforts that I will be doing in the next couple of months.

I recently had an interview with HOT (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap) and it made me think more about doing work for the humanitarian sector. Which is another reason why I will enter this challenge specifically.

Furthermore, I had worked previously on a humanitarian project with GFDRR after the earthquake in Nepal to create a dashboard for all incoming data. And it was a great opportunity and I learned a lot during that time.

This will be definitely more challenging.

I will probably enter the flooding challenge for Monrovia, Liberia. Coming up with a visualization for the burning question about flood prevention and potentially helping people with it is a huge burden and a huge motivator as well.

I‘m looking forward to challenging myself and come up with different ways to visualize these important datasets.

Asking the right question

The challenge already provided a few questions I will use as a guiding factor throughout my process. But as always during a coz project and data analysis, the real questions will come up during the process. So while I will start with these questions they might not be the ones I will choose in the end. Here are the questions to start with:

How can local government officials better understand, predict, prevent, and recover from flooding? 
What infrastructure is most vulnerable?
Where might flood impacts be the most severe, or the most preventable?

Sharing progress and my process

During the time of the challenge (it‘s due on July 15th), I will not only share my progress working on it, but I will also share my process tackling this issue.

Looking forward to working on this and sharing my progress here on the blog and on social media.