[Summary: join an open discussion on the potential impacts of open data on poverty reduction]
Over the next two weeks, along with Tariq Kochar, Nitya V. Raman and Nathan Eagle, I’m taking part in an online panel hosted by the World Bank’s Striking Poverty platform to discuss the potential impacts of open data on poverty alleviation.
So far we’ve been asked to provide some starting statements on how we see open data and poverty might relate, and now there’s an open discussion where visitors to the site are invited to share their questions and reflections on the topic.
Here’s what I have down as my opening remarks:
Development is complex. No individual or group can process all the information needed to make sense of aid flows, trade patterns, government budgets, community resources and environmental factors (amongst other things) that affect development in a locality. That’s where data comes in: open datasets can be connected, combined and analysed to support debate, decision making and governance.
Projects like the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) have sought to create the technical standards and political commitments for effective data sharing. IATI is putting together one corner of the poverty reduction jigsaw, with detailed and timely forward-looking information on aid. IATI open data can be used by governments to forecast spending, and by citizens to hold donors to account. This is the promise of open data: publish once, use many times and for many purposes.
But data does not use itself. Nor does it transcend political and practical realities. As the papers in a recent Journal of Community Informatics special issue highlight show, open data brings both promise and perils. Mobilising open data for social change requires focus and effort.
We’re only at the start of understanding open data impacts. In the upcoming Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries (ODDC), the Web Foundation and partners will be looking at how open data affects governance in different countries and contexts across the world. Rather than look at open data in the abstract, the project will explore cases such as open data for budget monitoring in Brazil, or open data for poverty reduction in Uganda. This way it will build up a picture of the strategies that can be used to make a difference with data; it will analyse the role that technologies and intermediaries play in mobilising data; and it will also explore unintended consequences of open data.
I hope in this discussion we can similarly focus on particular places where open data has potential, and on the considerations needed to ensure the supply and use of open data has the best chance possible of improving lives worldwide.
What do you think? You can join the discussion for the next two weeks over on the Striking Poverty site…