Like many years before, I will attend FOSDEM, the biggest open source convention in the neighbourhood: up to around 8000 attendees at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a good reason to take the train down south for a weekend.
Obviously, this year it will be (more than ever before) an online event. So from the comfort of my home, I’ve assembled a list of sessions I hope to attend:
Time to get back into the habit of capturing things on my website… First up: my calendar watch list and some events.
I’ve been keeping an “Open Dev” calendar with events related to open development and online civic space (data, standards, ethics, digital rights, and so on). I’m broadening the scope a bit to include more technical events as well. It’s “Rolf’s events watch list” now.
Last week I attended the XML Prague conference: 3 days of workshops and presentations about XML technology and tools that are widely used, but mostly invisible.
In 2016, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs introduced public IATI data as a replacement for quarterly progress reports for their grantees1, and so dozen of (mainly Dutch) organisations have started integrating IATI into their internal management information processes, and worked on ways to include the results of their projects in the data they publish.
Yesterday I attended the first Accountability Hack in The Netherlands, at the Court of Audit in The Hague. With a bit more than a week to go before the official publication of the government budget of 2017 (already leaked to the press the day before the #AccHack), and an election year coming up, it’s a great time to have a go at using the government’s open data to see if we can find out how the money is actually spent.
Today I had the privilege to present at the “Big and Open Data for International Development Workshop” at the Centre for Development Informatics of the University of Manchester. In my abstract, I anticipated deep research into traceability of activities in IATI data. We’ve certainly made great strides, and, as one participant of our IATI Learning Workshop of last week remarked, the level of discussion on IATI is high, and although there still are things to fix in today’s data, a lot of it is fine-tuning. So I made a pitch for IATI as a possible field of research.
Today, Open Development Camp is happening again. I’m part of a panel:
In the last five years much emphasis has been put on the publication of open development data. How useful has this effort been? What have we learned so far? and Which insights did we gain? Theo van de Sande (The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Leonardo Pérez-Aranda (Oxfam Intermón) and Rolf Kleef (Open for Change) will share their insights on this subject and together we will explore what the future has store for open development data.
My contribution to kick off the discussions:
The IATI Technical Advisory Group is kicking off, and one discussion I’m looking forward to is on how to publish “results”.
There are proposals by Herb Caudil of DevResults (1, 2) and earlier reflections by Bill Anderson (1). Herb’s proposals are good: we need indicator references (or even URIs), and it makes sense to have a separate standard to describe the definition and logic of indicators.
After a few days of discussing standards, and with some concerns of NGOs in the back of my head, some scattered thoughts:
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?”
Last week, at the Partos event for IATI implementation by Dutch NGOs, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that publishing data in IATI format would be part of the upcoming funding regime. That immediately led to many questions on how to publish, especially with respect to results of activities.