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12-13 November 2014

Al Ahram Editors Lab

Prototyping the Future of News

The organisers, the jury, the partner and the winning teams

The Global Editors Network (GEN) is a community dedicated to media innovation supported
by 20,000+ media innovators. More than 2,500 of those media innovators participate in GENs
yearly programmes and GENs annual conference called the GEN Summit. GEN represents the
leading media of the world and organises events bringing together the best newsrooms and
opinion leaders of the industry.
Al Ahram, founded in 1875, is one of the oldest newspapers in the Arab world and one of the
most widely circulated in Egypt.!
EMDP - Egypt Media Development Programs mission is to contribute to the growth and
development of the countrys media outlets in an effort to establish an industry that informs,
engages and inspires the community. It is the third time that GEN has organizes an Editors Lab
with EMDP.!
Google has been strategic partners of the Global Editors Network since GEN's inception in 2011.!

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Table of Content
The GEN Editors Lab Programme .. 3
Al Ahram Editors Lab ..

The Winner 4
The Special Mention 6
An Overview of the Other Projects ..
GEN Partnership with Google

Best Tweets 9
Survey . 9
Press .. 10
Stats .. 10

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The GEN Editors Lab Programme

The Editors Lab Hackdays is one of GENs key programmes for bringing innovation to the
newsroom. It is a worldwide series of Hackdays hosted by the worlds leading news
organisations such as The New York Times, The Guardian and El Pas, to name a few. Editors
Lab brings together developers, journalists and designers from the Global Editors Network
representing the best newsrooms from each host city.
Over two days, teams build news prototypes around a theme linked to the latest trends in media
innovation. After two intensive working days, teams present their prototypes to a jury who will
choose a winning team. The climax of the season is the crowning of the overall Editors Lab Final
Winner which gathers each national Editors Lab Winner at the GEN Summit.
In 2014, GEN launched the GEN Community. All Editors Lab participants use the GEN
Community as their platform to share and collaborate on the prototypes created during the
event.They connect to a worldwide network of media innovators.

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Al Ahram Editors Lab

Dates and Location!

The Editors Lab took place on November 12th - 13th at Al Ahram headquarters.

The Theme!
The theme of this Editors Lab was New tools to monitor the quality of government services.

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The Teams

Al Ahram

Akhbar Al You

Al Masry Al Youm

Masrawy

Rose Al Youssef

Welad El Balad

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Al Youm Al Sabea

 The Jury!
- Ahmed El Alfi, Founder and Chairman of Sawari Ventures, Founder of the Greek Campus.

- Tarek Atia, Founder and CEO of EMDP.

- Evangline de Bourgoing, Programme Manager at Global Editors Network.
The Speakers !
At the Editors Lab, three training sessions alternated with the working sessions.

- Hany Abdelkawi, Senior Business Analytics Lead at Google, taught a workshop about how
to best use Google Tools to monitor government services and shared insights about the
Egyptian media landscape.

- Magued Othman, CEO of the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research Baseera, former
Minister of Communications and Information Technology, gave a workshop about how to find
and use public data to monitor government services.

The Winner !
Welad El Balad won the Editors Lab with their project : El Sandoq (Trashcan).!
Piles of uncollected garbage blight the streets of Egypt posing acute health and environmental
risks. El Sandoq aims at making the Egyptian government accountable for its mismanagement
of the waste issue and the population more engaged in solving the garbage issue. As the team
explains, local government says that to become more accountable and get the job done right
they need people to throw the garbage in the right place and at designated times. Citizens in
the area have expressed the need to know where official designated spots are and when to
throw garbage so they can track whether the government and private sector is doing its job.
That is why the team from Welad El Balad developped El Sandoq, an app that enables its
users to win points when they fight against littering. They win points when getting out the
garbage in the right time (50 points), at the right place (50 points) and when reporting garbage
in the streets that had not been picked up the authorities (100 point and 150 points with a
picture).
Welad El Balad is a local media company. It has the resources to implement this local project
and it fits the need of its audience perfectly. As the team puts it with Welad El Balads unique
multi-platform media placement within communities we can calibrate online and print tools to
crowdsource data, use our professional journalist team to investigate government data as well
as multi-media tools to calibrate data resulting from the app to different audiences.This
includes: a section in the paper showcasing the Cleanest Community - use of network to create
community events and other. The team plans on building a visualisation displaying on a map
the data about garbage that they would have crowdsourced with the app and indicating the
dirtiest and cleanest areas.

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Screenshots of the application

The jury praised the potential social impact of this project. As Ahmed El Alfi explains, this
project would have the highest chance to become viral and have the broader social impact
and in Egypt we really look for the highest return in the social project that we try to implement
in the country. The problems are numerous and affect multiple sectors of the society and
broad-based solutions that other people can pick up on and support are the ones that should
be implemented the first because they are the most likely to have the biggest social impact.
The jury was also impressed by the fact that this project was not only a promising civic
engagement project but also a datajournalism prototype that has a great editorial interest.

Screenshot of the data-visualisation project

The Winning Team

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The Special Mention

Al Masry Al Youm won a special mention from its project Tagrobty - My Experience
In Egypt, 10% of the population suffers from disabilities, a percentage that keeps growing. In
2012, the Administrative Court issued a court ruling according to which an attendant should
assist disabled people in government offices and sign language interpreters should help the
deaf. But these measures have not been yet implemented.
The goal of the project is to monitor the quality of services delivered to people with special
needs and disabilities in Egypt. It focuses on the Tahrir Complex, the biggest governmental
complex in Egypt and provides disabled people with information on how to access the different
services and the different steps that they need to take in order to get the documents that they
need. Disabled people are invited to comment and rate the quality of the services that had
been provided to them. These comments and rankings will help the other users and will put
pressure on the government to improve its services.
The jury was impressed by this projects sleek design that makes it extremely user-friendly to
people with special needs and disabilities. It also praised the fact that this project addresses a
problem that keeps being overlooked by the government and the media.

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Tagrobty - My Experiences logo

An Overview of the Other Projects

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Al Ahram - 123 ER
An application designed to help you easily find the medical
facility you are looking for. You can navigate through it and
search for your best options based on your location, needed
specialty and users recommendations. It provides you with a
tool to monitor and rate the services of the facility and the
patient satisfaction.

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Akhbar Al Youm - SE7ETY

A medical record application for the Egyptian Ministry of
Health. The key features are:
- Availability of health info in case of emergency.
- Access from mobile devices and web browsers.
- Reporting for the government for best decision making.
- National ID is the key for identifying users.

Al Youm Al Sabea - Emergency and First Aid

An app to allow citizens to help each others when there is an
accident. It reports accidents, give general info on first aid and
the location of the nearest pharmacy and hospital

Rose Al-Youssef - Gowa Ilcima / Inside Cinema

An app to know everything about cinema. You have 4 sections:
- On the spotlight
- Now on theaters
- How to go to the cinema
- Ratings. In Egypt, there is no age-rating system for movies.
This app enables the users to give recommendation on what
movies are appropriate for which age.
Masrawy - Awraky / My documents
An app to help you navigate public services. It helps you gain
time when getting or renewing your governmental documents.
It indicates the documents needed for these administrative
procedures, notify you when you should update your
documents and let you give your feedback on the government
services.
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GENs Partnership with Google

Google was the official partner for the Al Ahram Editors Lab Hackdays and brought invaluable
knowledge to all the participating teams.
Google have been proud and engaged strategic partners of the Global Editors Network since
GEN's inception in 2011. Googles mission to organise the worlds information and make it
universally accessible and useful complements GEN's focus on converging, sharing and
innovating. As GEN strategic partners Google has been strong supporters of GEN
programmes, in particular the GEN Editors Lab, attending national Hackdays across the globe
in the first three seasons of the programme.
After his workshop, Hany Abdelkawi gave his feedback about the event :We are producing
technology, we get inspired by how people are using it in different fields and so today on the
media side it is brilliant how people want to use our data, tables, tricks, whatever you name it.

Hany Abdelkawi giving advice to the teams

Best tweets

Survey
A selection of the answers of our post-event survey
How would you describe your experience as a whole ? !

It was geeky, funny, worthy

Great
Fruitful
I am so proud to be here

What was the most useful part of the event for you? Why? !

- Google lecture
- Meeting new people and group work
- Ice breaking in the first day

What did you learn during those two days?!

- Google Fusion Tables. More about getting data.

- Sticking to the idea you are passionate about

- I learned how to be good presentator, creative mind and smart researcher
Any suggestions to improve our programme !
- You have to make sure every team is sticking to the description you put and the theme:
Monitoring the government & offering services.

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Press

Before the event :

- Masrawy announces the #EditorsLab
- Rose Al Youssef
- Welad El Balad
- English Egypt Independent
- Ahram Online: Al Ahram to host GEN's Editors' Lab on 12-13 November

After the event :

- Dream TV - Masr Fe Youm, a popular talk show (video)
- DotMasr: Welad El Balad Wins the competition
- Akhbarak: About Welad El Balad
- Al Masry Al Youm : Al Masry Al Youm wins the Second place and another article
- Masress

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Stats

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Twitter : 271 tweets with #EditorsLab

ScribbleLive : 256 unique visitors on our live-blog.
Average time spent on the live-blog : 30 minutes.

To sponsor, host or participate in GEN Editors Lab!

Evangeline de Bourgoing, Programme Manager

edebourgoing@globaleditorsnetwork.org
+33153012161
More about the Global Editors Network: www.globaleditorsnetwork.org
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