For a couple of years, we facilitated a crowd-sourced network of people working on #Open-data in #International-development , organising a couple of conferences in Amsterdam and Nairobi.
Imagine: you’ve produced your first data file using the IATI Standard: your organisation’s activities, partner organisations, budgets and results are neatly represented in an XML file. But before you publish that file, you’d like to show it to your team and colleagues and get feedback. XML will not get them very excited.
Next week, October 9 and 10, we’ll be hosting Open Development Camp at De Balie in Amsterdam. The first question often is: “what is open development?”
Friday last week, the ONECampaign tweeted Open for Change was nominated for an Honesty Oscar. In their own words:
The Academy Awards is a time to celebrate the best films, actors and behind-the-scenes players in Hollywood – so why not do the same for the incredible videos, infographics and songs that help fight global corruption through creativity and innovation?
ONE is teaming up with Accountability Lab for the Honesty Oscars 2014, a week-long event to honor groundbreaking people and creative that make our world more transparent and hold our governments and corporations more accountable.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard to publish information on aid activities, and is intended to be used by (and useful for) all actors in development aid.
Interest is definitely growing and several organisations are investigating how to implement the standard. In several countries, national platforms of civil society organisations (CSOs) are engaging in discussions with their respective Ministries how to encourage and support implementation of IATI by CSOs. In the UK, DFID is even making IATI-compliant publication of data a condition for funding. Implementing IATI brings to the surface various issues that need to be addressed, some specific for CSOs.
Within IATI, a dedicated informal working group is discussing these implications for CSOs. This CSO Working Group has produced a Background Paper, attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of such issues, and to work towards ways forward.
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20120613 i weeks-1-intro from Rolf Kleef
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20120613 i weeks-2-data from Rolf Kleef
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20120613 i weeks-3-howtoopen from Rolf Kleef
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20120613 i weeks-4-bbc from Rolf Kleef
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After Accra:
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20120613 i weeks-5-iati from Rolf Kleef
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Google Fusion tables http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/
Google Refine
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EDUCOEF data http://openforchange.info/oddc
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www.hackdeoverheid.nl
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In this newsletter:
On December the 8th the Open for Change network had its first Open Tea at the Amlab in Amterdam, to look back at the past year and discuss where we will be heading in 2012.
Mark Tiele Westra from Akvo presented openaid.nl, an initiative that makes open data on Dutch development aid visualized and searchable.
Marijn Rijken from TNO informed and invited us to participate on a research project on the effects of open data for the development sector.
We discussed the organization of the Open for Change network. Evident in the discussion was the important role the Open for Change network holds in connecting, exchanging and supporting open data initiatives and knowledge in the development sector. How this role should be filled in is something we are working on in 2012.
We want to thank the 1%CLUB, Akvo and TextToChange for hosting the open tea in the gorgeous Amlab, and hope to see you there again at the next Open Tea: March 8th, 15:00- 17:00 and after that Open drinks!
At various meet-ups at conferences in 2011, we discussed ways to strengthen the international network of open aid data activists.
In November, we submitted a proposal for a European Aid Data Network to the EuropeAid budget line of the European Commission, led by AidInfo in the UK, with Partos (NL), FORS (CZ), ACEP (PT), IGO (PL) and the Open Knowledge Foundation (UK). We hope to hear by early March whether we are invited to submit a full proposal.
In the meantime, AidInfo has asked Claudia Schwegmann of OpenAid.de to continue building out this emerging European network. We had a first conference call last Tuesday, and plan to have the next one on March 2nd.
To create joint channels of communication, we invite you all to:
The IATI NGO Working Group is a CSO-led forum that was created with the approval of the IATI Steering Committee to discuss the application of the IATI Standards to the work of CSOs and to present practical proposals on CSO-specific approaches to publication of IATI compatible data.
The CSO Working Group is co-chaired by Beris Gwynne, representing the International NGO Charter of Accountability Company, and Brian Tomlinson, representing the CSO Open Forum.
Both Partos and Open for Change are represented in the group, and we’re aiming to organise an “intervision meeting” for Dutch NGOs in March.
The next peer reference meeting is planned for beginning of March. The first general consultation will hopefully take place in April 2012. Read more on our blog!
If you want to bring in subjects or interesting news for next newsletter, you are more than welcome: send your contributions to info@openforchange.info
Owen Barder published an overview by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) on how far countries and donors are on their road map to publish their aid spending data before the High Level Meeting in Busan, end of this month.
If you’re curious about how the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) can help aid effectiveness, have a look at their video with some stakeholders:
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) from Development Initiatives on Vimeo.
The current discussion around open data often boils down to releasing data sets, and seeing nice visualisations and apps. But lets not forget that the full phrase is linked open data. The real power comes from linking the data. This week, the Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw lets us explore this more.
Just as web pages today link to other pages for further information, the data sets of tomorrow will link to other data sets, for more data. Your browser will help you navigate the data space.
The BBC is ahead in this game, and working on a “Digitial Public Space” project, linking together many sources of cultural data. Jake Berger writes on the BBC blog:
Early versions of this data model indicate that – as hoped – there will be many, varied and often unexpected journeys that can be made through these catalogues and the material they describe. For example, a user starting out by watching a film of a production of Macbeth from the Royal Opera House might then look at a scan of a rare musical manuscript from The National Archives, then browse similar manuscript scans held at the British Library, watch a clip from a BBC documentary about how paper was produced in Shakespeare’s era, before ending up learning about the plants used to make the paper using information from The Royal Botanic Gardens At Kew. In a [Digital Public Space], all of this could happen in the same online space.
That may still sound a bit like the current web of pages. Except: the publishers only provide standardised links for “Shakespeare”, “paper”, etcetera, and your browser makes the connections to offer you ways to move forward:
Mo blogged about the development of a web browser-based user interface, which navigates through these catalogues using the concepts of “people”, “places”, “events”, “things” and “collections”.
In international development aid, the IATI standard is an effort to work towards a similar “digital public space” in which you can navigate through “organisations”, “activities” and “results”.
An important part of establishing that space is to work towards joint standardised identifiers. At our ODDC conference in May, David Pidsley’s Virtual Workshop on Linking Development Data was focused on that, and next weekend, Tim Davies is organising an Organisation Identifiers Workshop as a fringe event for the Open Government Data Camp, in Warsaw, to continue working on this. And we’ll have more general Open Data for Development: Open Space session on Saturday morning.
We've participated in two interesting events in the last two weeks: the Open Aid Data Conference in Berlin, and the IATI in the Visigrad countries conference in Prague. A proper post is still due, but here's already a video of the closing talk from Transparency International's founder Peter Eigen, "Overcoming the fear of transparency":
[openaiddata.de] Peter Eigen – Overcoming the fear of transparency from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.
Today, Ben Knapen, the Dutch State Secretary for development cooperation, presented the “Resultatenrapportage”, the “reporting of results” on Dutch efforts in development aid in the period 2009-2010. He used the occassion to also present the first release of Dutch government data in the IATI standard format, making The Netherlands the fifth signatory to deliver on its commitment for phase 1 of the IATI agreement.
The “Resultatenrapportage” report itself is the result of the collaboration of some two hundred writers from government and NGOs, in a process led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Partos, the Dutch platform of organisations in development cooperation.
To make the report a stepping stone towards sharing more data online, it is no longer being printed, but instead made available as PDF document, with links to offer easy access to background documents and data.
At the same time, the State Secretary announced the opening of http://www.minbuza.nl/opendata with the first set of spending data released, up to date to the end of the second quarter of 2011.
Behind the scenes, the last bits are put in place to automatically register the data at the IATI registry. The data will be udpated quarterly, so the next release is expected to already happen in early October.
It will be interesting to see how the regular publication of the data leads to continuous improvement of the data: less jargon, less abbreviations, clearer descriptions.
In addition to the IATI data, there also is a set of documents of embessies, reporting on the progress of particular projects in countries around the world. An open challenge is to now find ways to link the information in these documents to the data available in IATI.
Knapen expects civil society to also publish their data in IATI, so that it becomes easier to look directly into the operations and processes happening at the core of international development cooperation.
The Guardian has made a website to slice and dice the data of the World Bank, DFID, etc. In collaboration with Akvo, the Ministry is doing a pilot project to show their water project portfolio, but Knapen hopes that parties in The Netherlands will also explore the expanding universe of data to answer their own questions and develop their own perspective on what is happening.
After offering the report on a (symbolic) USB stick to Nebahat Albayrak of the Parliamentary committee for foreign affairs, she said she hopes the open data will make the political debates more informed and perhaps even a bit more objective, but also stressed the importance of reflecting on actual impacts as done in the “Resultatenrapportage”.
Albayrak also hopes to also evaluate the “resultatenrapportage” and the “open data” initiatives and standards from the perspective of effectiveness for their work in the “kamercommissie”.