DataDesk is a data collection, management and distribution platform built by Media Hack Collective for African users and newsrooms. DataDesk is built around the constraints that exist in African newsrooms and is focused on making data collection as simple as possible.
DataDesk is built with ease-of-use in mind. Data can be uploaded directly from Google Sheets or as CSV files. Data is immediately available for download in CSV or JSON format. Simple tagging, meta data, bookmarks and search makes it easy to sort and find datasets.
DataDesk is designed around tidy data principles and has built-in transformations such as merging multiple tables, pivoting tables and a query-builder to create new views of tables. Transformations are as simple as possible and don't require any data programming skills. Transformations are point-and-click easy.
DataDesk was built by Media Hack Collective (MHC), a South Africa-based data journalism publisher. DataDesk was funded in part by the Google News Initiative via an innovation grant in 2022. MHC has been active in the Africa data journalism space for more than 5 years and has developed DataDesk based on lessons learned during this time.