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:
The IATI standard is meant to make it easier to exchange and compare information about activities and funding flows in development aid worldwide. But it can be useful within a (network of) organisations as well, even if you don’t feel ready to share that data with the rest of the world (yet).
Large organisations are starting to see the benefits: adapt your internal project management system so that it contains the necessary information in the right format, then export it to IATI data from there.
You then have an internal, vendor-independent format for your data, and have a choice of tools to put that data to use.
Ay caramba, Ubuntu 12.10: Get it right on Amazon!:
Another glimpse at the new Ubuntu, and at what makes it awkward. Mr. Shuttleworth has already declared that all your data belong to him …
“Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already.”
Silly me, I was thinking I had root over my own computer, and noone else, but apparently I should check the code. And 12.10 includes data-leaking features you need to switch off yourself.
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.
You’re enjoying a sunny day in the park with some friends. You get out your smart phone to find that piece of music your friends really should hear, and all of a sudden, a flock of colourful mini helicopters appears out of nowhere, and perform a gracious dance in the sky above you while the music plays. Then they disappear again.
Sounds futuristic? Yeah, even still looked futuristic when I saw this at the GLOW Festival in Eindhoven, last November:
Science fiction is quickly loosing its fiction part and is becoming reality. The Electronic Countermeasures installation was a proof of concept of the technology, but now the Pirate Bay is preparing for the next step: using these flying robots to build a “low orbit network of server drones”. Let the robots in the sky help you share, independent of providers and regulators.
The military are building drones for “ Non-cooperative, Biometric Tagging, Tracking “, facial recognition to follow people in a crowd, so why not use the same tools for to monitor police operations in demonstrations?
Although still relatively expensive, the drones are a nice addition to the $100 Satellites, using balloons and kites to make maps and asses situations, for instance in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or working with communities in Peru:
Lets build Drones For Good!
A short excerpt from Professor Robert Chambers’ public lecture on 23 January 2012 in which he lists the words which can be found in the Paris Declaration and those that cannot.
“For anyplace to stay cool it has to suck.” Dmytri Kleiner wrote up some interesting thoughts on making communities more continuous and stable. When a place becomes too cool, it becomes too crowded, and the regulars are replaced by a more transient crowd that has no deep bonds to the community of regulars. Referring to a quote by Yogi Berra, “ nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded “.Dmytri draws on his experience with 28C3, the latest Chaos Computer Congress, held yearly at the end of December, in Berlin, and proposes The Suck Principle:
Only places that suck can really have a continuous community, because if nothing about the place sucks, it will attract more and more people until it sucks because of crowding. So if you want a continuous, closely knit community, something about the venue or event must suck, your only choice is what should suck or how it should suck.
I think it’s a variation on what I regularly tell organisations who want to build an online platform around their mission: community is about exclusion, not about inclusion. It’s about constructing boundaries, whether enforced or self-selective.
Offline, physical location or dimensions are usually one of the barriers. Dmytri dismisses the option of relocation CCC, but my experience with for instance Web of Change at Hollyhock, on Cortes Island. off the West coast of British Columbia, is that “traversing the barrier to entry together” is a bonding experience in itself, creating community bonds that extend well beyond the few days that participants spend together.
Online, there usually is plenty of stuff that sucks. But little of it forms barriers to entry that double as “social objects”, around which participants can come together and bond, both with each other as well as with the social norms of the community you then enter.
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.
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.
Ever since we started networking as “development 2.0 pioneers”, we wanted to express our core values, so we can grow our network into a movement.
In January we adopted the name “Open for Change”, and worked to organise the world’s first “Open Data for Development Camp” (ODDC) in May, to bring together the people in that movement.
Based on the conversations we had with many of you (before, during and after ODDC), and inspired by other manifestos, we now have created a beta version of the Manifesto for Open for Change, and love to hear your feedback.
The Manifesto is the foundation for more plans and activities to grow our global movement. Schematically, it could look like this:
We see “Open for Change” as an open source brand and as an international ecosystem, based on the Manifesto and with a light-weight organisational and technical structure to connect various projects and activities:
Most of these are in their conception phase, some are already starting to take shape with people working on it.
Our focus now is to get feedback on the Manifesto and to hear your thoughts on the “open source brand” and the organisational form it should take.
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