Mirko Lorenz is a journalist, information architect and trainer, based in Cologne, Germany. His main job is working on innovation projects for Deutsche Welle.

He started working on web projects in 1995 and as a result can tell a few rollercoaster stories from the past. For the future he hopes to put data to good use: Knitting together Open and not-so-open data for journalism and - ultimately - storytelling.

Mirko is active as a speaker and trainer for data-driven journalism. Together with the European Journalism Centre (ejc.net), Mirko helped organize one of the first international conferences on data journalism in Amsterdam in 2010.

At PICNIC Mirko is going to speak about trustable data services and stories, which could help us to live and survive, in cities or in the wild. One way to get there would be to move from attention to trust as the basis for such services. His article on how to turn media companies into trusted data-hubs, co-authored by Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Gheoff McGhee, was published by OWNI and Nieman Labs.

Mirko has spoken about possible uses of data-driven journalism at Stanford University (Innovation Journalism Conference, 2010), in Geneva (Investigative Journalism, 2010) and at OKCon in Berlin, 2011.