Jacopo Ottaviani

CDO in Nairobi, Kenya

Visit my website

Jacopo Ottaviani is an ICFJ Knight Fellow and works as Chief Data Officer (CDO) at Code for Africa. He is busy building teams of developers, designers and storytellers to produce cross-border journalism and develop digital tools for media and civic engagement, in Africa and beyond.

He is experienced in data journalism, digital cartography, immersive storytelling and transnational data projects, and builds narratives and visualisations around data and fieldwork. His works have been published by, among others, DER SPIEGEL, El País, Al Jazeera International, De Correspondent and Internazionale.

In 2017 he built projects such as Slumscapes in partnership with Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Search and Rescue open data portal with MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières).

In 2016 he launched «Lungs of the Earth», an immersive journey across the rainforests of the world and #Borderline, an interactive atlas of migration in Europe.

He is co-author of The Migrants' Files, a cross-border data project that uncovered exclusive information on the human and economic costs of immigration in Europe. The project was awarded with the Data Journalism Awards 2014 and the European Media Prize 2015.

In 2015 he made the web-documentary E-waste Republic which was awarded with the DIG Awards 2015 and the Lorenzo Natali Media Prize 2015.

In 2014-15 he coordinated Generation E, a crowdsourced data project that unveiled findings about intra-european youth migration, published by 10+ international media.

He is on Twitter: @JacopoOttaviani

  • Work
    • Code for Africa