Will DeepSeek be a game changer like ChatGPT was? The benefits and the public release of their models could level the playing field, as Mike Pound of the University of Nottingham argues in this Computerphile video. But will it be able to challenge the current quasi-monopoly, and democratise AI? And how accurate are the DeepSeek claims anyway?
ChatGPT is a hot topic. Tom Scott compared it to a “Napster moment”, when suddenly everyone started sharing music and videos, Jonathan Stark called it the iPhone effect, when everyone started using a mobile device everywhere, and Bart Lacroix compared it to the first time using Google or Spotify: “I opened [ChatGPT] in my browser as a tab and never closed it since.”
Some practical examples of using ChatGPT as a tool to run an organisation:
Over the last weeks, I started exploring XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Its purpose is “ to improve the accountability and transparency of business performance globally, by providing the open data exchange standard for business reporting.”
There are clear parallels with IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, the open data exchange standard for development and aid activities I have been working on.
In essence, the data collectors benefit more than the data publishers in both cases: what can we learn?
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.
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.
I’m some two months into exploring traceability in IATI data, spending free hours (days…) on developing tools to do more. In April, the Strategic Partnerships funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs are expected to publish their first data, so that’s a good chance to see how well they managed to tie all their activities together.
Dozens of new organisations are getting ready to publish IATI data: the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs made it a requirement for the grantees in the strategic partnerships programme on lobby and advocacy that started this year.
The Ministry has published their guidelines on how to create a useful IATI data set, and part of those guidelines (chapter 3) is an overview of how to represent the structure of funding and activities.
I’m helping organisations get their data in order, and so I was looking for an easy way to see the structure of activities in their data. Browsing through XML data only gets you so far…
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?”