Repairing Democracy Through Data Viz

This month we are looking forward to hosting Marcus Crowley, founder of democra.me, a company which aims to shore up democracy in the face of fake news, broken promises and existential threats.

Abstract:
Democra.me's first project is BeatJosh.com, which applies UX and data-visualization to the federal and state budgets. We have transformed multiple dense PDFs into a reference resource for voters, students and concerned citizens. We allow everyone to come and play with the budgets, remix them to their hearts' content, and share them on social media or export to Excel. By allowing people to 'play', we hope to raise the base level of understanding of the economy so that we reduce the impact of false claims and misleading figures in political news stories, and parties and citizens can repair their trust in each other. The end goal would be to ensure that tough, long-standing issues such as low economic growth, indigenous inequality and climate change get resolved.

The talk will include examples from around the world and Australia to illustrate the problem, and if time permits will share similar projects being done elsewhere.

About the presenter

• Arts and Law degrees from University of Melbourne
• Previously ran tech companies in HK and SYD
• Lived in England, France, Hong Kong, Australia
• Programmer since high school
• Founded democra.me in 2019.

Looking forward to seeing you all here at the Sydney AI Hub!