When you head to the polls, how much do you know about a candidate before you vote for him or her?

Do you know whether the candidate completed college? Who his or her key contacts are? Whether the candidate owns real estate, a business or shares in public companies? Whether the candidate has been in any legal trouble? Who financed the campaign?

The answers to these questions, which are critical to informing voters, are too often hidden from the public.

That’s true here in Panama, where transparency for politicians and candidates is considered optional.

To sustain user attention and drive audience engagement, journalists and news organizations should learn to use data visualizations.

Data visualizations let you explain a set of data simply with an infographic, an interactive application or a chart. With multiple stories competing for users' attention on the boundless Internet, data visualizations are a creative way to interest users in your content and add context or a different perspective to your story. Leading media organizations are using Datawrapper, a simple and free tool, to improve their storytelling.

There is nothing more essential to life than water. Yet in Costa Rica, potable water is in short supply, even for people living close to the country’s world-famous beaches.

I thought, what better way to help the media find out why water-distribution systems fail and identify solutions than by bringing journalists, data-visualization experts and developers to a place that struggles to maintain a regular supply of clean water? So we held Chicas Poderosas on the Beach, a meetup in Nicoya, Costa Rica.

It was winter in South Africa but the political season was hot, searing with the tensions arising from the crumbling of apartheid. The year was 1990, and Nelson Mandela had been free for only a few months after 27 years in prison. Other anti-apartheid activists were similarly tasting freedom for the first time in decades, returning home from prison or from exile around the world.

On this day in June, I slowly made my way toward the Voortrekker Monument outside of Pretoria. It’s a symbol of apartheid and shrine to the Afrikaner people who created that peculiar system of racial oppression.