The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard for the exchange of information on activities, budgets and results. More and more NGOs are embracing the standard as well, and in The Netherlands, civil society is actively working with IATI:
We’ve organised another Open Tea, last Friday at the Vrije Universiteit, with updates, two presentations, and networking drinks, kindly hosted by CIS-VU, the Centre for International Cooperation at the VU University in Amsterdam.
Victor de Boer and Anna Bon helped make this possible, and Victor wrote a blog post about it. And Araz Najarian of Connective Age wrote up a summary of the presentations, including a link to a with co-presenter Nana Baah Gyan video demonstrating RadioMarché.
One of the side-events of the Open Government Data Camp, last week, was an Organisational Identifiers Workshop put together by Tim Davies and Chris Taggart. The meeting discussed the various challenges in linking information about organisations held in separate data sets. Although participants were careful to avoid the word “ ontology “, one of the break-out groups did look at describing relations between organisations. Since I graduated on research into “part-of” relations in an ontology, and what you can infer from them, I joined that discussion. Here’s what we came up with.
The workshop was a good chance to catch up with where things are right now, with several organisations at the table and participating online that have to deal with information about organisations:
How to create identifiers for organisations across the world, which might not be registered anywhere, and which relate to each other and to more generic concepts, in such a way that we can capture all the meaningful relations and data we want to capture?
How to make sure it works with the schemas already in use in big organisations? And that it works with data stores that are not open? Without introducing another naming authority?
We split up in a couple of groups, one looking at identifying public bodies, another at the technical architecture that might be needed, and a third at common terms to describe relations between organisational entities. I joined that third group.
We spent some time discussing various types of relations, and I also looked around to find possible candidate schemes, but without much luck. I couldn’t find an obvious example, like the FOAF standard for personal relations. A few standards, like OrgPedia, or the Organizational Ontology, seem likely candidates, but don’t cover this area (yet?).
We looked at some use cases:
We acknowledged additional cases, like finding influential relations between corporate or organisational entities based on board membership or roles of individuals, but decided not to take that on in this discussion.
We came up with a first-version typology of relations. The naming and exact semantics will need further review.
These are relations between entities that have a “permanent” and “structural” character. Of course, all these relations are bound in time, but the beginning and end points may not be known.
We distinguished two sub categories.
(This typology still fails to capture something like a brand as abstract entity.)
These are relations that express a change in the structure or responsibilities of some entities, often the beginning or the end of particular entities. We identified four basic types:
More work is needed to mold this into a useful standard (relations are currently described from the perspective of one end, there is still plenty of room for interpretation, things have not been tested on real-life examples described as use cases, and so on).
And, of course, we’d need those organisational identifiers to refer to other entities, and find ways to delegate resolving identifiers to services that can provide additional information on those identities. See the whole report of the workshop on the OGDCamp wiki for the results in the other discussions as well.
But thinking about and discussing relations between those entities brought back memories of all the fun in making machines infer and report unknown relations 🙂
Aid Transparency Barcamp Nepal, run jointly by YoungInnovationPvt. Ltd and aidinfo, is a conference to raise the awareness of the foreign aid scenario in Nepal. It intends to create a platform to initiate conversations and connections on the effective use of ICTs to support aid transparency and effectiveness. There will be a chance for organisations and individuals to showcase innovative ideas and tools that promote effective accessibility and visualization of aid data. Further, it is hoped that it will create a platform where the best technology products around aid data can be collaborate, supported, sponsored and promoted. It is also an opportunity to raise awareness of the International Aid Transparency Initiative’s (IATI) standard for publishing aid data.
Featured speakers will include Bibek Raj Kandel, Simon Parrish, Anjesh Tuladhar, Aman Shakya, Bibhusan Bista, Hemanta Sapkota, and Prabhas Pokharel. Sessions will include:
This event is targeted at the tech community (programmers, app developers, FOSS enthusiasts, mobile developers), INGOs, aid donor communities, government officials, the media and aid transparency professionals and practitioners.
For more information on this event, please visit the website: http://nepalaid.yipl.com.np/
BoF “Open data in development” at OKCon (via Tobias Eigen)
But what did we learn from open source? Two days of Open Knowledge Conference gave lots of food for thought. And lots of inspiration as well: plenty of projects doing interesting work, and experiences to share. And to add a cherry to the cake, we had a great “open lunch for development” with several people active in development aid. My (delayed) take-aways for Open for Change.
Nigel Shadbolt and Andrew Stott shared their lessons from setting up data.gov.uk, and Tom Lee talked about data.gov and the recent threats of its budget cuts.
It’s crucial to have top-down support, bottom-up activists, and middle-tier connectors, to bring everything together.
There are many reasons to embrace open data, don’t rely on a single one to make your case: tranparency and accountability; economic value, growth and innovation; efficiency and cost-effectiveness; improving (public) services; (public) engagement; and civil society and social capital.
Close the feedback loop: the “build it and they will come” approach won’t work here either. Try to publish data that matters to people, but also consider that “data probably has a long tail”.
Statutory requirements matter.For governments, this mainly has to do with legal frameworks and obligations. But every organisation could (and should) enshrine crucial elements of open data in their policies: how to ensure “open” stays open, and how to prioritise.
In open data, a lot can be learned from “open source”. In terms of tools and practices, I think we are, but in terms of the stories we tell ourselves and others about why we do it, Benjamin Mako Hill gave some interesting insights on the promise of open source to create better software because more people will be able to see, comment on, and improve the code.
In reality, this hardly happens. He showed graphs of projects on Sourceforge, the first major hub of open source software. The median number of developers working on a project is one. If you only look at “mature projects” (multiple releases, longer history), the median is still one. If you look at the most popular projects (10% of most downloaded), the median is two.
In other words: there are very, very few projects where mass collaboration did happen.
And we actually don’t really understand why some of them succeed.
It doesn’t mean we should not do open source, but we should not promote it with the story that it leads to peer review and better code. There are plenty of other reasons, though, and we should make sure we capture those in our Open for Change Manifesto as well:
In our beta Manifesto, we tried to capture the essence of why we want to be open, and OKCon was a chance to reflect on it.
I liked a definition given by Jose Alonso of the Web Foundation: the web is humanity connected through technology. And as Brewster Kahle of archive.org said: the last generation put a man on the moon. Pretty cool, but our generation can make all knowledge available to all people on earth, for always and for free. That’s a powerful ambition too.
It is crucial to also translate the promise of open data, open access and open knowledge to “effective use”: how do we make sure we create autonomy, control and empowerment, but more even so: security for the ones who want to realise their “ right to access”? “Open” is part of a struggle for human rights.
Hopefully, a joint “Slash Open” campaign can unite the efforts of many organisations working for humanity in shaping the technology we need and put it to effective use.
The list of people signing up for the Open Data for Development Camp is growing. We’ll have people involved in defining the International Aid Transparency Initiative standards, people involved in making development data open in governments and organisations, people working on Open Access, on the Apps for Development contest, and more!
We hope even more of you will make it to Amsterdam on May 12 and 13, but now there is a chance to participate online as well: David Pidsley is coordinating a two-day online workshop to collaborate on Linking Development Data.
Join us, online or offline!
Two weeks ago was the Ecampaigning Forum (ECF) organised by Fairsay in Oxford, and directly after that, the Open Data for Campaigning Camp (ODCC) put together by Tim Davies, Javier Ruiz and myself. One direct result of our efforts to promote the use of open data in campaigning organisations is Greenpeace’s experiments to make their measurements of radiation levels near Fukushima available as raw data: http://www.greenpeace.org/fukushima-data (way to go, Andrew! That’s two-star open data). Good to remember that the teams have to deal with lots of logistics and radioactive decontamination, so publishing spreadsheets isn’t at the top of their priorities.
By the way, next week, I’ll be at re:publica and re:campaign in Berlin, again talking with NGOs and campaigners about open data.
I just returned from an intense week in the UK: an IKM Emergent workshop in Oxford, and the Open Government Data Camp in London had me almost drowning in “open data” examples and conversations, with a particular angle on aid data and the perspectives of international development.
As the result of that, I think we’re ready for a “Debian for Development Data”: a collection of data sets, applications and documentation to service community development, curated by a network of people and organisations who share crucial values on democratisation of information and empowerment of people.
Mid 2009, after the 1%EVENT, a couple of innovative Dutch platforms came together to explore the opportunities of opening up our platforms: wouldn’t it be great if someone in an underdeveloped community had access to our combined set of services and information?
We had a hard time escaping new jargon (federated social networks, data portability, privacy commons, linked open data, the semantic web) and sketching what it would look like in five years. But then again, suppose it was five years earlier: in mid 2004, no-one could predict what Youtube, Facebook and Twitter look like today, even though many of us already felt the ground shaking.
A year and a half later, “open data” is catching up with us, and going through a similar evolution. Governments and institutions have started to release data sets (the Dutch government will too, the UK released data on all spending over £25,000 on Friday). So when will the social dimension be embraced in open data?
At an IKM Emergent workshop in Oxford, on Monday and Tuesday, around 25 people came together to talk about the impact of open data on international development cooperation. We discussed when we would consider “linked open data” a success for development. One key aspect was: getting more stakeholders involved.
Then at Open Government Data Camp (#OGDCamp) in London, on Thursday and Friday, around 250 people worked in sessions on all kinds of aspects of open data. Several speakers called for a stronger social component: both in the community of open data evangelists and in reaching out to those for whom we think open data will provide new opportunities for development.
At IKM, Pete Cranston described how his perception of access to information changed when a person approached him in a telecentre to ask how the price of silk changed on the international market: he was a union representative, negotiating with a company who wanted to cut worker salaries because of a decline in the market price. Without access to internet or the skills to use it, you don’t have the same confidence we have that such a question can be answered at all.
Then at OGDCamp, David Eaves reminded us that libraries were (partly) built before the majority of the population knew how to read, as an essential part of the infrastructure to promote literacy and culture 1.
Telecenters fulfil a role in underdeveloped communities as modern-day libraries, providing both access as well as the skills to access information and communication tools via the internet.
But we don’t have “open data libraries” or an infrastructure to promote “open data literacy” yet.
It shouldn’t be necessary for people to become data managers just to benefit from open data sets. Intermediaries can develop applications and services to answer the needs of specific target groups based on linked open data, much as librarians help make information findable and accessible.
There are also parallels with open source software. Not every user needs to become a developer in order to use it. Although it is still to think otherwise sometimes, the open source movement has managed to provide easier interfaces to work with the collective work of developers.
The open data movement can identify a few next steps by looking at how the open source movement evolved.
| Open Source | Open Data |
|---|---|
| Software packages (operating systems, word processors, graphics editors, and so on) are developed independently. Each software package can choose the programming language, development tools, the standards and best practices they use. | Data sets (budget overviews, maps, incident reports) are produced independently as well. The data formats and delivery methods can be chosen freely, and there are various emerging standards and best practices. |
| Communities around software packages usually set up mailing lists, chat channels and bug trackers for developers and users to inform each other about new releases, problems, and the roadmap for new versions. The mantra is “many eyes make all bugs shallow”: let more people study the behaviour or the code of software, and errors and mistakes will be found and repaired more easily. | Data sets mainly are published. As Tim Davies noted in one of the conversations, there don’t seem to be mailing lists or release notes around data sets yet. To deliver the promise of a “wisdom of the crowds”, users of data sets should have more and better ways to provide feedback and report errors. |
| Open source software is mostly used via distributions like Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, separating producers and integrators. A distribution is a set of software packages, compiled and integrated in a way that makes them work well together, thereby lowering the barrier of entry to use the software. Distributions each have a different focus (free software, enterprise support, user-friendliness) and thus make different choices on quality, completeness, and interfaces. | Perhaps the current data sets released by governments could be considered “distributions”, although the producer (a department) and the integrator (the portal manager) usually work for the same institution. CKAN.net could be considered a distribtion as well, although it does not (yet?) make clear choices on the type and the quality of data sets it accepts. |
Software distributions make it possible to pool resources to make software interoperable, set up large-scale infrastructure, and streamline collaboration between “upstream” and “downstream”. The open character stimulates an ecosystem where volunteers and businesses can work together, essential to create new business models.
To sum up several concerns around open data for development:
So why don’t we start a “Debian for Development Data”?
We stimulate the social component by providing more stakeholders a point of entry to get involved through socio-technical systems. We stimulate literacy by offering the stakeholders ways to get open data, publish their own, experiment with applications, and learn from each other. And we circumvent the tendency towards over-standardisation by doing this in parallel with other initiatives with sometimes overlapping goals and often different agendas.
1A quick check on Wikipedia indicates this seems to have mainly been the case in North-America, though.
Racing back to Amsterdam at 270 km/h, time to consolidate my takeaways from this year’s FOSDEM in Brussels. More geeks (5,000+ expected), more lectures (200+) and more topics I wanted to follow: succeeded with OpenOffice, Drupal, and CouchDB, but not with Mozilla and XMPP. A geeky overview of my takeaways.
Already some 5 years ago, we put PDF and Word output of surveys into our WebEnq online survey software, and recently we added more extensive reporting options as well, giving partners in IICD’s Monitoring and Evaluation programme a text document with all major calculations and tabulations already filled in. And right now, Jaap-Andre and Bart are working on a way to generate hundreds of personalised PDF reports from student data on courses they took and evaluated.
In our first approach we worked with Latex, since it offered the kind of formatting options we were looking for (keep a question and all answer options on a single page, for instance). Latex is a complex beast to tame, and the conversion to PDF and Word is far from flawless. Bart found ODTPHP, a library that might help us use OpenOffice documents as reports templates instead, which definitely would help — but again, a lot of functionality to be desired.
Yet, the XML-based ODF standard feels like the best way forward. What I learned at FOSDEM:
Bart Hanssens gave a high-level overview of some ODF aspects, with my takeaways:
Svante Schubert (Sun) talked about the ODFDOM project:
And he mentioned LpOD, a project about which Jerome Dumonteil (Ars Aperta) spoke next. lpOD is written for Python, Perl, Ruby, and partly focuses on using ODF for XML repositories, more than on individual documents. Think of large multimedia sets like in the Louvres, with combinations of text, film, photo, and so on.
The list of takeaways from the Drupal talks I attended is considerably shorter:
Stephane Combaudon gave a nice introduction to CouchDB for people used to working with SQL/RDBMS. Document-oriented, working with JSON, RESTful, and then written in Erlang and using MapReduce functions… It definitely seems to make a lot more sense than the current struggle with database tables, but I haven done any functional languages or lambda calculus since my university courses.
The XMPP room was full when I arrived there, so I thought I’ll then have a look at Mozilla’s talk about HTML5, but ended up in an even bigger crowd not able to fit inside that room. Mozilla’s update on Thunderbird, on Sunday, turned out to be rescheduled to earlier when I arrived there in time, and Mark Surman’s talk about Drumbeat in Europe was at the same time as a Drupal talk I wanted to see.
So only heard a few things about the XMPP sessions from a friend who did get in, and exchanged a few words with Mark in the hallway, but even our plan to hook up at one of the many parties at night fell through.
Again a year of getting up to speed with the latest and greatest in a short time, in enjoyable Brussels.
In the middle of the Ecampaigning Forum, I’m trying to turn my notes about Monday’s “pre-ECF” session on Social Actions and the Change The Web contest into a blog post. Peter Deitz presented his vision on making opportunities for social activism available on the web, and together with Janelle Ward, Thiago Carrapatoso, Romina Oliverio, George Irish, Amy Sample Ward and Jonathan Waddingham, we looked at 8 of the submitted application for the Change The Web contest (deadline for submissions is this Friday!). Here are my notes of the discussions we had.
Great appeal, could be promoted by an organisation to their Facebook constituency. Good presentation in search results, maybe more narrowed down would work better. Adding the “favicon” of sources as “bullets” to the list of promoted actions may be nice. Add promoted actions to your news feed so that friends can “share” and “like” those actions (“share” now leads to share the application, but several of us don’t like to add apps to my profile. Perhaps use the “redirect” mechanism in Facebook so that the Facebook toolbar is on the top of the page you and up, makes sharing easier too. Perhaps show the number of clicks on an action (is available in the Social Actions API?)
We had some concerns hether it should be a “destination site” (who would go there?) or should be a widget? Maybe just a widget based on specific topics? It might be nice to combine it into a service, so that when a topic I care about is trending, it will post a tweet on behalf of me? Or maybe send a tweet with an action for a trending topic? (This kind of adds to the “trending spam” that seems to emerge already, so not sure if it’s a really good idea). Or maybe combine this with something like cloud.li (makes a cloud of words you tweeted) with added actions?
This plugin selects the actions to present based on the tags of the post (the plugin from Social Actions selects words from the whole page content). We liked the presentation with the emphasis on the action type. Although in our little groiup, WordPress also turned out to be the most-used blog tool, it might be relatively easy to clone this plugin into also a Drupal module?
It mentions taking Open Social as a starting point, so we’re curious to explore more of the opportunity for this one (we didn’t quite see the Open Social aspect yet). It could also take the Facebook to a higher level. The idea of promoting things is generally shared, but not everyone would like to see the “dollar value” on it too (some would like to, others would be scared off, maybe this is related to cultural differences? So it would be great if it not only shows donations, but all kinds of social actions. And maybe it can then also suggest next actions for you based on your “action profile” (whether you’re more into giving or loaning money, volunteering, petitioning, etc.)
We generally liked the button. We gathered a couple of suggestions for the pop-up. Maybe it could contain a link to “more actions like this”, or “previous/next” or “see another” options. A “share this” box may be nice too. Perhaps it also would be nice to have a few variations of the button, for instance with the Social Actions logo? Our main concern for this application right now, is that it is relatively hard to install. Perhaps it would be possible to deliver it as a WordPress plugin as well? Or make it more like a bit of javascript or code that you can more easily paste into a page?
Yes we need an iPhone application 🙂 Bringing actions to your (i)phone is obviously interesting. It would be great if those actions would be actions that you can do from your phone, or close to where you are. TheExtraordinaries are building a similar tool. It would be really great if it also works with “social networking” features, for instance find friends in the same March? Also, it would be great if what you contributes to a “bigger picture” somehow, as a form of crowd sourcing. An example that was mentioned: safe bicycle routes. By using the GPS on your phone and cycling a route, you can then upload it as a “safe route”, and make it part of a bigger map and route planner.
Right now, it adds a search engine. It’s powerful in its simplicity, but we had some discussion on who would use it (not everyone uses the search box). We discussed some additional features mainly, like a toolbar in Firefox, or a sidebar application with opportunities around the page you’re looking at (like the Knowmore addon for Firefox.
Peter already explained how Social Actions will be working on their search interface, so seeing this submission kind of felt like a great start for that. Especially the idea of having permalinks for searches is good, and it would be great if the search engine could be tailored and made available as a widget, for instance to put actions around “Earth Day” on a web page, or allow people to search “human rights” activities on your site. The RSS feeds on search results is great too. It would be great to add keyword highlighting to the results.
That’s it. Thanks for all the submitters of applications, and all the participants on Monday. I really got a better sense of what Social Actions is, and could grow into. (We had a conversation about Open Actions at the following Ecampaigning Forum, but need to write that up still.)