Miso project: how it will help you make your own Guardian-style infographics and data visualisations

Here on the Guardian's data team, we've wanted to help you visualise our data and create new viz styles for a long time. And now, thanks to some great work by the Guardian's Interactive team, that dream has moved one step closer. This week, developers Alastair Dant and Alex Graul launched the first part of the Miso project. In this piece, Alex explains it is a Set of Open Source tools designed to make it faster and easier to create high quality interactive and data visualization content You can see more about the project here on its home page - which also has some examples of visualisations created using the code. It's funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation , as part of its support of our Global Development site - and has been developed with Boston-based Bocoup . If you're not a developer but just interested in data and journalism, you might be a bit baffled by how it can help you, but it does. We wanted to give our users tools that would help them create data visualisations in a Guardian style - or be able to create their own styles. That's still in the future. But this release has brought it all much closer. Right now, you'd need some development expertise to take advantage of Miso. But imagine if you were a data journalist in Nairobi, or New York, if you could easily visualise your data using this code? It's the equivalent so far of building the engine. What we want to do is create the steering wheel, clutch and gears. Follow the project on Twitter here: @TheMisoProject . And watch this space. More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world's global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook