New York, NY – Wednesday 24th September 2014: New visualizations of 15 years worth of data on the Millennium Development Goals, five million citizen voices on the next development agenda and over two hundred million Twitter conversations were unveiled at an event hosted by Microsoft in their new Technology Center in Times Square.

The event will bring together members of the newly formed Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, leaders in the technology sector, civil society, UN representatives and private sector partners to explore these and other initiatives in a ‘Data Playground’.

“There is a great deal of talk on the data revolution and what exactly it means for the next development agenda. This event will showcase two main ways to demonstrate this ‘revolution’ – by showing new ways of understanding existing datasets, like we have on the MDGs; and how to form an understanding of new forms of data, such as from social media”, said Corinne Woods, director of the UN Millennium Campaign.

MDG Data – http://www.mdgleaders.org/data-visualizations
5 Million Voices – http://data.myworld2015.org/
Twitter Analysis – http://post2015.unglobalpulse.net/

Since the Millennium Development Goals were launched in 2000, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. As part of the UN Millennium Campaign’s ongoing efforts to highlight the tremendous progress made on the MDGs, we are launching an unprecedented initiative to map official UN data in partnership with Microsoft.

This new visualization represents an innovative approach to communicating progress made toward poverty eradication and galvanize momentum as we rally in the final 500 days for MDG realization. By using Power View to demonstrate data in an accessible and digestible format we can tell the story of the unprecedented progress made toward eradicating global poverty, and inspire continued global efforts. The visualization will be hosted on the new MDG Leaders website and compliment the virtual edition of the MDG Leaders Report.

For more information please contact:
UN Millennium Campaign – Gabo Arora at gabo.arora@undp.org
UN Global Pulse – Jennifer Poole at jenny@unglobalpulse.org
Microsoft – Kate Krukiel at Kate.Krukiel@microsoft.com