From Fog Nets to Neural Nets

Model the water output from water-collecting fog nets in Southwest Morocco. Accurate predictions can improve collection efforts and enable greater access to fresh water throughout the year. #development

$15,000 in prizes
Completed may 2016
543 joined

Visualization challenge description

Welcome to the visualization challenge! We're excited to partner with the Tableau Foundation to help bring the power of effective data visualization to social good organizations.

There are many ways in which effective visualizations enable Dar Si Hmad and its US counterpart, The Tifawin Institute, to deliver on their mission. A winning visualization may reveal new insight to the team. It may help the organization communicate its impact to stakeholders. It may engage and educate the community on the fog harvesting project. Or it may do something else entirely.

In order to capture these diverse goals, we're awarding two sets of prizes to two different sets of winners. The first set, the Expert Panel Award, will be selected by a judging committee of visualization experts and organization staff from Dar Si Hmad, Tifawin Institute, Harvard, Datablick and Tableau. The second set of prizes, the Community Voice Award, will be the result of sharing the visualizations with Moroccan community members and discovering which are most impactful, engaging, or educational.

Additional data

In addition to the data provided for the algorithm challenge, we are providing anonymized water usage data for households served by the Dar Si Hmad water project. These data help to give a picture of the complete interaction between the meteorological production of water and the human consumption of it. This data is available from the data download page under "External Data."

A note on the water consumption data: Each household pays 20 MAD (Mococcan Dirham) per month as a service charge. So the quanitity purchased is the amount they pay above that 20 MAD charge. DSH has a tiered water pricing system to encourage water conservation:

  • 1st tranche (pricing tier): 0-6 cubic meters of water
  • 2nd tranche: 7-9 cubic meters
  • 3rd tranche: >9 cubic meters

The water consumption dataset contains a row for each household/structure in each of the villages served by the project:

  • village - The village that the structure is located in
  • subscriber_id - A unique ID for the structure
  • village_resident - If the owner of the structure lives full time as a resident in the village
  • is_school - If the structure is a school
  • is_mosque - If the structure is a mosque
  • is_connected - If the structure has a meter and is connected to the water system
  • subscription_jun_2015 - The amount of water used in June 2015
  • subscription_jul_2015 - The amount of water used in July 2015
  • subscription_aug_2015 - The amount of water used in August 2015
  • subscription_sep_2015 - The amount of water used in September 2015
  • subscription_oct_2015 - The amount of water used in October 2015
  • subscription_nov_2015 - The amount of water used in November 2015
  • subscription_dec_2015 - The amount of water used in December 2015
  • subscription_jan_2016 - The amount of water used in January 2016

Visualizers can choose any combinations of the available data or other publicly available data that tells a story that they find compelling.

If you use outside data as part of the visualization challenge, you are required to post a link in the competition forum to the dataset.

Map of locations

Village Lat Long
Agni Ihyia 29.2341667 -10.0562500
Tamerout 29.2245833 -10.0499167
Id Soussan 29.2311111 -10.0400000
Agadir Id Al ghachi 29.2344167 -10.0421667
Id Sator 29.2370556 -10.0341111
Aguejgual 29.2337222 -10.0291667
Id Achor 29.2290556 -10.0212778
Timtda 29.2210000 -10.0266111

Submission Instructions

To compete in the visualization competition, you must publish a Tableau visualization to Tableau Public and supply links to the published visualizations on the DrivenData visualization submission page. A panel of judges will evaluate these submissions to determine the winners. Here are the steps:

  1. Registrants receive a free copy of Tableau Desktop Professional. If you do not have a copy of Tableau, you can download it here.
  2. Get your key from the DrivenData competition key page.
  3. Download the data and create your visualizations!
  4. Publish your visualizations to Tableau Public.
  5. Before the competition deadline, submit links to finished visualizations on the DrivenData visualization submission page. These are the submissions that the judges will consider.

While you can submit up to 10 visualizations, your best bet for winning is to go for quality over quantity. Furthermore, prizes are awarded per user/team, not per visualization. You are able to add and remove submissions during the competition.

After scoring and ranking the visualizations, the top entities (users/teams) will receive prizes. So, even if you have the top three visualizations, you will be awarded just the first place prize.

Note: Tableau employees are not eligible to win any prize money that is underwritten by a Tableau Foundation grant. If you are an employee, you are still very welcome to participate. Your submissions will be considered for recognition and, more importantly, will help to deliver positively impact to DSH and the Moroccan communities it serves.

Getting started

There are many great tutorials for Tableau Desktop. Here are a few to help you get started.

The Expert Panel Award

The Expert Panel Award will be decided on by a group that consists of both content-area and visualization experts. Judges will give visualizations a score from one to ten in four separate categories:

Aesthetics Relevance Insight Creativity
How visually compelling is the visualization? Is it digestible and does it have a clear point of view? Every visualization tells a story. How does this visualization tell the story of Dar Si Hmad? What unusual features of the data does the visualization highlight? Does it help the organization or its funders learn about the fog water project? How thoughtful and unique is this visualization? Does it bring in data that provides a new perspective? Does it analyze the existing data in a new way?



Jamila Bargach

Dar Si Hmad

Jamila is one of the founders of Dar Si Hmad. An anthropologist by training with a PhD from Rice University, she has taught at University Mohamed V in Rabat. Jamila has also worked in various NGOs in Morocco, and is the founder of Tilila, a shelter for women suffering from domestic abuse. She has published numerous articles on adoption practices, unwed mothers, gender and development as well as the book Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in Morocco (2002). She is a lover of the South and truly believes that this region offers unique opportunities for students to learn about Morocco and to discover how applied development projects unfold in specific contexts.


Leslie Dodson

Tifawin Institute

Leslie is the Executive Director of Tifawin Institute, a humanitarian engineering organization that works at the nexus of environmental issues, research and participatory development. Leslie is an award-winning broadcast journalist who has reported throughout the world for Reuters, NBC and CNN, among others. She worked extensively in South America and Asia covering politics, economics, and international finance organizations. She began collaborating with Dar Si Hmad in 2012 when their development projects served as case studies for her PhD dissertation.


Neal Myrick

Tableau Foundation

Neal Myrick has worked as a Program Management Director at Tableau Software since October 2012, and in 2014 he was appointed as Social Impact Director. His new mission is to build and grow the efforts of the Tableau Foundation whose mission is to encourage the use of facts and analytical reasoning to solve the world’s problems.


Jeff Pettiross

Tableau Software

Jeff has been dreaming about information design and user experience since he was a kid, spending hours sketching out interface elements for games on his TRS-80. Now he's all grown up but feels like a kid in a candy store working as Tableau's User Experience Manager. It's his job to keep up with the great ideas about UX, visual analysis, and flow generated by the rest of Tableau and their awesome customers.


Anya A'Hearn

DataBlick, Tableau Zen Master

Anya has been working for over 20 years in analytics, business intelligence and data visualization. Her client projects have focused on analysis for financial services, information security, mobile and Web applications, social media monitoring, airlines, and customer segmentation and targeting. She runs the boutique Data Visualization and Analytics consulting firm DataBlick, which proudly provides services to various Fortune 100 firms. Blending her background in economics and product design, she enjoys using Tableau to blur the lines between data visualization, infographics, and art. She is proud to be a Tableau Zen Master, Tableau Iron Viz Champion, and Tableau Social Ambassador. In her free time she uses her data viz skills to support various Tableau Foundation projects and champion Data + Women initiatives.


Romain Vuillemot

Harvard Center for International Development

Romain Vuillemot is a Data Visualization Fellow who currently works on the design of novel visualizations for The Atlas online. Romain holds a PhD in Computer Science from INSA Lyon, France (2010) and was previously a post-doc at AVIZ, INRIA Saclay, France (until 2013). His general research interest is in the visual communication of complex data. He specifically focuses on exploring novel visual design spaces, as well as structuring existing ones. He is also interested in making visualization more accessible and understandable to non-initiate both on the web and in casual environments.



The Community Voice Award

For the Community Voice Award, we're taking your visualizations to the streets of Morocco. Dar Si Hmad will interview community members served by the fog water project, in person, and share the visualizations produced for the competition. The visualizations that inspire the most engagement, education, and interest from the community will be awarded prizes.

These visualizations should be designed with a clear, storytelling focus. Much of the community has low literacy and numeracy, so the visualizations that are most compelling won't rely heavily on text explanations. When designing for the community, it may be helpful to understand more about other Dar Si Hmad programs such as their professional training program RISE and THRIVE and their water-cycle education program. Some of the topics that may be interesting the to the community include macro-climate and micro-climate trends that affect their lives, a clear educational picture of the water cycle, the trends in water consumption and community engagement, and anything else you may think of!

This portion of the prize pool will be organized by Dar Si Hmad staff in Morocco. By presenting visualizations to men and women in the community and discussing their reactions and what they learn, the staff will identify the most impactful visualizations for this award.


Good luck and enjoy this problem! If you have any questions you can always visit the user forum!