This is a read only archive of pad.okfn.org. See the shutdown announcement for details.

• Gianfranco Cecconi, @giacecco, Digital Contraptions Imaginarium Ltd.

• Wikimedia DE has a space dedicated to anyone doing things open!

• The same framework has been used across different countries, focusing locally to their country

• FOI law had just passed at the time and organisation being created to manage that included open data in its scope and framework; that was a success
• Test the methodology vs the stakeholders, typically the government departments that may have had already put effort into implementing more open policies
• Ome': peer support was instrumental to success
• data hackathons were organised in university for the very first time
• WF was difft from other funders in that "We were given the room to include what we are learning" - i.e., adapting based on learning
• the international links were also important to have visibility of other players and opportunities such as World Bank's
• ZCh: open data is not just about government-run open data portals there are many alternative sources and we see that people ara aware of this and use them
• How do you fill the gap between data being made available and delivery services? moreover, is the data published by the government really relevant?
• GCr: we started fro opening up budget data; we already have a very rigid legal framework to manage that so the information was available although data quality is still poor. We geo-coded the data so that we could tell what's happening close to a school or a building and what its execution stage was. Geocoding is understood by everybody and is very powerful.
• Accessibility was subject to lots of reflection, and the roles of intermediaries in particular
• JMA:  [what was the question to the panel?]
• ESA: is there a "conflict" between advocates for accessibility and open data? For the former, PDF and Excel are great, for the latter, only machine-readable data in open formats is worth it. This must be addressed. 
• Ome: [describes a similar experience] Moreover, PDF is seen as a tool to assure that the files could not be "vandalised"
• ZCh: capacity is an issue, too; how can government operations be optimised to embed rather than retrofiit open data https://twitter.com/giacecco/status/489016914329747456 
• Q&A
• Christopher Wilson (The Engine Room) Q: ? ZCh A: early feedback from government is positive
• Kate Townsend (USAID) Q: how can the US Government help? A: ZCh: we believe we can push this initiative beyond the contexts where it has been successful already. ESA: among the tasks in the action plan to take this forward is engage other countries; when you promote OGP (?) you can make that part of your agenda. GCr: build suistainable models that cover end to end open data workflows from creation to usage. Ome: this is also a great opportunity to engage youth to use data and tools, asking questions, get interested in the subjects the data is actually about
• Q: how did people / community react to your work? A: GCr: you could see how open data became just a pretext to talk about anything! coming from academia, reading very specialised, "vertical" papers on very specific subjects, that surprised me; people wanted to talk, people wanted to share  
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• SSh: we stepped back from the question of open data and investigated the state of data in general at three municipal services, and how that drove the demand for open data
• We got residents from slums to document the status of running water and public toilets / sanitation facilities where they lived and documented that on interactive map that then were integrated into forums to  used to communicate with the local administrators
• Our work of data collection on site was facilitated by mobile apps, in a country where the government still uses paper for the same process!
• Maurice: in the Philippines the government implemented a "full disclosure policy"...
• MCa: ... but we have a FOI bill that has been in parliament for 7 years now. It is a country of contraddictions. 
• The full disclosure policy requires local government to disclose reports and data on both their websites and centrally
• Digital divide obvious problem, internet penetration is 36%
• I confirm in many cases that the data being released is not what is really interesting, e.g. I get what the budget is for doing something but why can't I know who the supplier is?
• RMa: [some city's] major asks us to get things going even without his involvement or approval, and the first open data portal was created that way
• We use the buses' GPS data to check the services for example; the data proved that the suppliers for the night buses services cheated, they had less vehicle than planned and they were speeding!
• SSh: https://twitter.com/giacecco/status/489026503167201280  
• Q&A
• Q: replication and scaling of your initiatives, what's your experience? A: Maurice: replication easy, scaling? SSh: it is important to recognise quickly that your organisation can't do everything, you need to know your limits and understand where additional capacity and scope can come from
• Q: why only women in children in the pictures  documenting the Transparent Chennai project? A: SSh: we observed that different demographics articulated the problem of toilets and sanitation facilities differently, e.g. for women the problem was mainly about finding a dark, secluded place where they could have some privacy for defecation, but for children timing was not important but rather proximity, e.g. if there was a ditch close to the place they lived. This in turn drived what information was more interesting to them.
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• Chris Wilson, Engine Room, "Responsible Data" project, investigating "evil" usage of data
• Samantha ?, @samanthajcuster, AidData, series of experiments and randomised control to check people's reaction to data
• Fabrizio Scrollini, Latin American Open Data Initiative
• Joe Foti, Open Government Parnership Independent Reporting Mechanism, early factoid results available
• Waltraut Ritter, Open Data Hong Kong, study of information and data policies in 13 east asia countries. Found no correlation between GDP and open data readiness. We defined "information power distance" that is a measure how unlikely it is for a citizen to even think that they can get data from the government. Study is CC-licensed
• Zara Rahman, @zararah, Open Development Toolkit, premise of our work is that data is available but not that accessible, e.g. too much duplication.

• SEl: we're studying data in the judiciary system. We noticed that the system was neglected by the open data movement in Argentina. 
• Francois: we're studying the use of open data in the 20-something public universities, e.g. if it was at the base of decision making.
• ICS: studying open data and budget. Transparency agenda pushed by Indonesia finance minster. Understanding impact and who uses the data is key question at this stage in our project.
• Nidhi: studying open data opportunities in oil and gas extraction
• FSc to NSr: who uses the data and for what?
• NSr we noticed differences between the industry ecosystem of coal and the one for oil and gas. Complexity makes so that data occasionally simply did not exist although we intuitively expected it did. When it exists, it is often not accessible or bad quality. Government sometimes is simply "content" they published the data. 
• As different agencies start publishing, we also found lack of coordination and synergies causing duplication.
• FSc to FVS: is the scenario easier in education?
• FVS: there are 3 open data suppliers: government, an NGO and a business that enriches the data and sells it back to the government.
• FSc to SEl: are the institutions transparent?
• SEl: very conservative sector but things are changing positively. We managed to compare 3 different countries to see if their attitude to open data changes the results. Chile has both open, Uruguay has open government but closed judiciary, ? [too fast sorry]
• Key finding: not knowing about open data is sometimes the only blockage to adapting an open data agenda in governments
• When open data is available, it is often not what the people need
• Unfortunately we still do not have evidence that there is correlation between opennes and accountability in the judiciary system
• Strong negative reaction from some of the countries such as Argentina suggests to me that our initiative is working :-)
• ICS:  government does not know what data they have, we know of public servant enquiring colleagues to have access data that they don't know was published already!
• Transparency is not enough, data must be in context and people must perceive it matters to them, e.g. granularity sufficient to give insight to people and where they leave
• Q&A
• Q: What KPI for accountability you used? A: SEl: we could not measure because the data was not sensitive so it did not really mean much!
• Q:  What's the rationale they give you not to share environmental data? A: we've been investigating deforestation, e.g. volume of forests lost. Governments don't claim confidentiality but rather publish data that is not detailed enough, so we know if a forest was cut, but not why and by whom for example. About pollution data of areas with extraction activity, we noticed inconsistencies, e.g. holes in the historical data.
• Q: can you make examples of your research informing decision makers? A: NSr: lack of dialog between the sector-specific bodies and the central India open data initiatives.   ICS: our work is close to the Minister of Finance. FVS: thanks to our research, the commercial intermediaries I described before need now to revise their proposition, e.g. the NGO can choose if to match the same performance index used by the commercial intermediary and become a competitor, or focus on alternatives. SEI: sometimes you see the effects of what you do after a long time
• Q: if usability is a problem, can't we converge to a standard of usability? A: NSr: ? FVS: depending on who is doing the measuring, how you define use can be different. E.g. NGOs can have an open data agendas driven by an ethical rationale that stands even if nobody uses the data! Governments and businesses in particular do it as a business case, and if there are no users there is no point in publishing open data.