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Avatar of Sam Leon

by Sam Leon

Open Humanities Hack, 21st-22nd November

October 11, 2012 in Events, Sprint / Hackday, WG Humanities

Where?: Guys Campus, Hodgkin Building, London, SE1 1UL

When?: 21st-22md November

Sign up: Please fill in the sign-up form

Humanities Hack is the first Digital Humanities hack organised jointly by the Kings College London Department of Digital Humanities, DARIAH, the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project and our Open Humanities Working Group.

The London event is the first of a series of hack days organised for Digital Humanists and intended to target research-driven experimentation with existing Humanities data sets. One of the most exciting recent developments in Digital Humanities include the investigation and analysis of complex data sets that require the close collaboration between Humanities and computing researchers. The aim of the hack day is not to produce complete applications but to experiment with methods and technologies to investigate these data sets so that at the end we can have an understanding of the types of novel techniques that are emerging.

We are providing a few open humanities data sets but we welcome any addition. We are currently collecting data sets here, if you have any that might be useful for the event please do put them in.

Possible themes include but are not limited to

  • Research in textual annotation has been a particular strength of Digital Humanities. Where are the next frontiers? How can we bring together insights from other fields and Digital Humanities?
  • How do we provide linking and sharing Humanities data that makes sense of its complex structure, with many internal relationships both structural and semantic. In particular, distributed Humanities research data often includes digital material combining objects in multiple media, and in addition there is diversity of standards for describing the data.
  • Visualisation. How do we develop reasonable visualisations that are practical and help build on overall intuition for the underlying Humanities data set
  • How can we advance the novel Humanities technique of Network Analysis to describe complex relationships of ‘things’ in social-historical systems: people, places, etc.

With this hack day we seek to from groups of computing and humanities researchers that will work together to come up with small-scale prototypes that showcase new and novel ways of working with Humanities data.

As numbers are limited for this hack, please register here.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Sam Leon (sam.leon@okfn.org) or Tobias Blanke (tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk)

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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

OKFestival Green Hackathon

September 10, 2012 in Events, OKFest, Sprint / Hackday, WG Economics

Green Hackathon

  • When: 19th-20th of September
  • Where: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Hämeentie 135 C Helsinki (Hack workshop 3)

Welcome to two days of hacking for openness and sustainability at the OKFestival in Helsinki. This is an opportunity to meet great developers and sustainability experts and to help out our planet with some innovative coding.

This event is part of the Green Hackathon series of events taking place across Europe and it will comprise two days of working hands-on to improve and disseminate sustainability data. It will begin with a short presentation on Wednesday morning (Sept. 19) and end with a Show-and-Tell of the results (Sept. 20).

The focus will be on opening up and improving existing sustainability data and improving existing applications. The following challenges will be featured in the programme (time slots during Wednesday and Thursday will be confirmed in case you would like to drop by for their hacking session):

  • “Land Matrix” by Neil Sorensen, International Land Coalition
  • “Energy Pulse” by Thomas Thurner, Semantic Web Company / Open Knowledge Forum Austria (OKFO)
  • “Big Oil Facts/Truth” by Denise Recheis, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP)
  • “A Github for Environmental Data” by Chris Adams, AMEE UK
  • “Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Study – Helsinki” by Markku Suvanto, Siemens Finland
  • “tbc” Ed Borden, Cosm/LogMeIn

Many different contributions are welcome, including coders, designers, data specialists, economists or sustainability thinkers. The participation format is flexible, you can stay for the whole two days or drop in and out helping out some existing team. Participation is free and a OKFestival ticket is not required. Come along and help us with the challenge of opening up sustainability knowledge and making it more accessible!

How do I participate?

Participation is free and an OKFestival ticket is not required.

This event is part of the Open Knowledge and Sustainability Stream.

To register your interest for participating: http://lanyrd.com/2012/okfestival-green-hackathon/

If you would like to participate, but are not attending the OKFestival, please e-mail us at sustainability [at] okfestival.org.

More information about the event at: http://okfestival.greenhackathon.com

This blog post is also published at here.

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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

OpenDataMx: Opening Up the Government, one Bit at a Time

September 4, 2012 in Events, External, Featured, Featured Project, Labs, OKFN Local, Open Access, Open Content, Open Data, Open Economics, Open Spending, Policy, School of Data, Sprint / Hackday

On August 24-25, another edition of OpenDataMx took place: a 36-hour public data hackathon for the development of creative technological solutions to questions raised by the civil society. This time the event was hosted by the University of Communication in Mexico City.

The popularity of the event has grown: a total of 63 participants including coders and designers took part and another 58 representatives from civil society from more than ten different organisations attended the parallel conference. Government institutions participated actively as well: the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, IFAI and the Government of the Oaxaca State. The workshops were about technology, open data and its potential in the search for technological solutions to the problems of civil society.

The following proposals resulted from the discussions in the conference:

  • Construct a methodology to collectively generate open data from civil society for reuse in data events as well as to demonstrate benefits of government bodies to adopt the practice of generating their data openly.
  • The collective construction of a common database of information and knowledge on the topic of open data through the wiki of OpenDataMx.

After 36 hours continuous work, each of the 23 teams presented their project, each based on the 30 datasets, provided by both the government and civil society organisations. As currently little open government data is available, the joint work of civil society was essential in order to realise the hackathon.

Read the Hackathon news in Spanish on the OpenDataMx blog here.

OpenDataMx1

The judging panel responsible for assessing the projects was comprised of recognised experts in technology, open data and its application to civil society needs. The panel consisted of Velichka Dimitrova (Open Knowledge Foundation), Matioc Anca (Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente), Eric Mill (Sunlight Foundation) and Jorge Soto from Citivox.

The first three projects were awarded money prizes ($30 000, $20 000 and $10 000 Mexican pesos respectively), allowing the teams to implement their project. An honorary mention was given to the project of the Government of the Oaxaca State and the Finance Ministry (SHCP) about the transparency of public works and citizen participation. The organisers of the hackathon also tried to link all teams to the institution or organisation relevant to their project in order to get support and advise for further steps. The organisers: Fundar, the Centre for Analysis and Investigations, SocialTIC; Colectivo por la Transparencia and the University of Communication would like to thank all participants, judges and speakers for their enthusiasm and valuable support in building the citizen community.

OpenDataMX2

Here are some details about the winning projects:

FIRST PLACE

Name of the Project: Becalia | becalia.org

General Description: A platform, allowing firms and civil society to sponsor students with limited economic means to continue their higher education.

Background to the problem: There are very few students who receive a government scholarship for higher education. Additionally, few students decide to continue their education to a higher level, less than 20% in all states. The idea is to support the students who do not have the means and enable the participation of civil society.

Technology and tools used: Ruby on Rails, Javascript, CoffeeScript

Datasets: PRONABES (Programa Nacional de Becas para la Educación Superior) – National Scholarship Program for Higher Education

Team members: Adrián González, Abraham Kuri, Javier Ayala, Eduardo López

SECOND PLACE

Name of the Project: Más inversión para movernos mejor (More investment for better movement) | http://berserar.negoapps.com/

General Description: A small website for citizen participation, where users are asked to allocating spending to a type of urban mobility e.g. cars, public transport of bicycles, signalling their preference on where they would like the government to invest. After assigning one’s preferences, the users can compare them with the actual spending of the government and are offered multimedia material informing them about the topic. Background to the problem: There is lack of information on how the government spends the money and the importance of sustainable urban mobility. Technology and tools used: HTML, Javascript, PHP, Codeigniter, Bootstrap, Excel and SQL

Datasets: Base de datos del Instituto de Políticas para el Transporte y el Desarrollo -ITDP (Database of the Policy Institute for Transport and Development) http://itdp.mx

Team members: Antonio Sandoval, Jorge Cravioto, Said Villegas, Jorge Cáñez

THIRD PLACE

Name of the Project: DiputadoMx | http://www.tudiputado.org/ General Description: An application that helps you find your representative by geographical area, political party, gender or commission he or she belongs to. The application is compatible with desktop and mobile technology. Background to the problem: Lack of opportunity for citizens to communicate directly with their representatives. Technology and tools used: 
HTML5, CSS3, JQUERY, PYTHON , GOOGLE APP ENGINE, MONGODB

Datasets: Base de datos del IFE del diputados (IFE Database of MPs) Team members: Pedro Aron Barrera Almaraz

HONORARY MENTION:

Name of the Project: Obra Pública Abierta (Open Public Works)

General Description: Open Public Works is an open government tool, conceptualised and developed by the Government of the Oaxaca State and Ministry of Finance (SHCP). This platform is created in order to make public works more transparent, presenting them in a simpler language and encouraging citizen oversight from the users community. Open Public Works seeks to create state transparency policy of the 3rd generation in the three levels of governance. This open source platform is also meant as a public good that will be delivered to the various state governments to promote nationwide transparency, citizen participation, and accountability in the public works sector.

Background to the Problem: There is lack of transparency in the infrastructure funds spending by the state governments. The citizen is not familiar with basic information about public works realised in their community and no mechanisms for independent social audit exist. Moreover, state control bodies lack the ability to control and supervise all public works. Public participation in the control of public resources is essential to solve this situation, where society and government should work together. Additionally, there is no public policy cross all three levels of government for the transparency of this sector. Finally, the public lacks too§ls and incentives to monitor, report and, if necessary, denounce the use of public resources in this very nontransparent government sector.

Technology and tools used:  API de Google Maps V.2, PHP,  JavaScript y Jquery

Datasets:
 Data set de obra pública de la SHCP y SINFRA/SEFIN del Gobierno de Oaxaca (Datesets of piblic works of SHCP and SINFRA/SEFIN of the Government of Oaxaca).

Team Members: Berenice Hernández Sumano, Juan Carlos Ayuso Bautista, Tarick Gracida Sumano, José Antonio García Morales, Lorena Rivero, Roberto Moreno Herrera, Luis Fernando Ostria

For more information:

Photos and content thanks to Federico Ramírez and Fundar.

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Avatar of Esa Mäkinen

by Esa Mäkinen

Hackday for News Apps at OK Fest

September 4, 2012 in Data Journalism, OKFest, Open Data, Sprint / Hackday, Visualization

GOAL: You have six hours to make a working news app. There are three of you, a coder, a graphic designer and a journalist.

Is it possible?

Yes. Five times in the last two years the biggest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, has invited people to do just this, at HS Open hack days, which I first talked about on this blog back in February. In the basement of our offices, groups of three have made data journalism that has even landed on the front page of Helsingin Sanomat.

Kunnanluoja-game was created at HS Open. It shows what will happen population and political structures in Finnish cities if the government forces the cities to merge. Plans to force mergers of cities has been one of the hot topics in Finnish politics for a few years.

On Friday 21st September, Helsingin Sanomat will organize the sixth HS Open, at OK Fest. This time we are processing data from the Failed State Index and the World Bank. The data will be provided by Helsingin Sanomat, but groups can use any data they choose.

The goal is to make a News App: a 560×400 pixel program that can be embedded to any web site. It can visualize the data or gather news data from users.

Participants can sign up individually or as groups. We will divide the participants into teams with all the necessary skills. We hope that people will discuss their ideas beforehand. E-mail is good, but if you can meet up during OK Fest that would be great!

The purpose of HS Open is to learn a new trade, datajournalism. The News Apps you make are yours, but we hope that we will be able to buy the best apps and publish them on our site.

You can find out more details about the day and sign up here. Places are limited, so get in touch soon. Hope to see you there!

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Avatar of Laura Newman

by Laura Newman

Development Data Challenge

August 31, 2012 in Events, External, School of Data, Sprint / Hackday, WG Development

Over the weekend of 25th and 26th August, the second event in a series of ‘Development Data Challenges’ took place at the Guardian’s offices in London.

What is a ‘Development Data Challenge’?

Development Data Challenges are an interesting concept. They draw together a disparate group of people (we had development experts, coders, designers, data wranglers, journalists and various intrigued individuals), and ask them to use data and technology in order to answer a development-related question.

The last Development Data Challenge took place in Washington DC in June, and the next will take place at OKFest in Helsinki this September. All are welcome!

In London, the day began with an entire wall covered in questions. All were interesting, but it soon became apparent that some were more feasible than others. Even after careful selection, several teams struggled to find the necessary data.

As Julia observed in her blog, ‘the leitmotiv continues to be data availability and data quality’ – ‘if the model was only to continue to deliver those datasets already identified… that would not be good enough’.

The Chosen Projects

Over the course of the weekend, a host of teams worked on a variety of questions.

1. Mapping access to water in South Sudan

One of the most inspiring projects for me was ‘Watermap’. The team mapped wells and settlements in South Sudan, ultimately allowing you to identify the settlements that are furthest from their nearest water source.

By the end of day one, the team had already produced this visualisation – or at least an alpha version of it. By selecting various filters, you can pinpoint all wells across the country, explore a heatmap of settlements, and even see where all the natural waterways in the country flow. Take a look!

     

NEWSFLASH: Dominik Moritz has walked us through the process of the tools he used and what he did in order to create this visualisation on the School of Data blog. To get inspired by his Data Wrangling project, head over there and check it out!

2. Media and aid

Another team attempted to analyse how media coverage affects aid donations. Sounds simple? Far from it. As Katherine Purvis explains in her blog, ‘media coverage’ had to be reduced to the official YouTube channels of 31 reputable news organisations, ‘donations’ were those recorded by the Financial Tracking Service and ‘natural disasters’ had to be carefully selected (interestingly, no data could be found on donations after Hurricane Katrina). Even then, the data was difficult to wrestle with. But the team managed to come up with this visualisation. The x-axis is TV coverage per minute, the y axis is donations, and the size of the bubble represents the number of people affected. Interesting stuff.

3. Geo-locating Schools and Health Clinics in India

Given the time I have recently spent in India, I was particularly interested to watch this project progress.

The purpose of this project is to use geo-located data to map community services in India. The ultimate aim is to create simple mobile applications which would allow users to search for the nearest services. Primary user stories include: ‘Where is the nearest clinic?’ ‘When is the next vaccination day?’

The project has received data from the Karnataka Learning Partnership.

You can see the work in progress on the Konekta website, view the code on Github and see the data on the Datahub.

4. Aid projects in Malawi

Another team created an interactive visualisation, which geo-locates aid projects in Malawi by sector.

It’s worth having a play with their map. They managed to include a serious amount of information (amount of funding, status of project, donor agency) onto a visualisation that still looks friendly.

The data came from the Government of Malawi’s Aid Management Platform, and the relevant datasets can be found stored on the Datahub.

5. Tracing aid – from tax revenues to the ground

Another group attempted to trace the flow of aid money right from the point of collection to its actual expenditure. This was fraught with difficulty. Often, there are multiple links in the chain: e.g. DfID grant money to the World Bank, who sub-grant to local partners, who may even sub-grant again. How much gets where it is meant to go to? What percentage is lost along the way?

At present IATI data isn’t complete enough to really drill into these questions. The team was often stumped after a long chase by finding the dreaded words ‘Implementing Organisation: Other’. Before the task began, there had been all sorts of interesting discussion about if and how final impact could be measured – but there were many barriers to address before that stage could be reached. Nonetheless, some useful information was collected about aid flows. Perhaps there will be a future opportunity to take this further.

6. How good is IATI data?

The final group worked on a set of tools to examine the quality of data published by aid donors. The Guardian Development blog reported some of their early findings:

  • “Only 20% of IATI data files include information on what results – if any – have been achieved by aid projects.
  • Less than 0.002% include details on any conditions attached to donor funding.

Next steps include developing tests to examine what data has been published, and how useful it is, and to see how to weight different tests to get an overall data quality “score”.”

Find out more

  • By contributing offline, Rufus Pollock pulled together a neat list of the various tools that people were using during the day. If you used something else, you can add it via this spreadsheet

  • The Guardian Development blog have produced an excellent summary of the day, with links to much of the raw data and output code.

  • Come along for the next event in Helsinki!

  • … And don’t forget to check out Dominik’s post about Watermap on the School of Data blog.

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Avatar of Joris Pekel

by Joris Pekel

Open Culture and Science Hackday at OKFestival

August 23, 2012 in Events, OKFest, Sprint / Hackday

picture

At the OKFestival in Helsinki next month, the Open Heritage and Open Science streams will be kicking off their three days of activities with a joint hackday dedicated to working with and building things with open cultural and scientific data. The day will involve a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, a digital humanities coding sprint working with tools such as TEXTUS, Pundit, and any other new tools people feel inclined to create, the opportunity to work with recently opened datasets from Finnish cultural heritage institutions and the Europeana API – and much more! Hackers will also have the chance to develop applications for the new PyBossa crowdsourcing platform, to hack for Louhos research software libraries and to contribute to the developing plans for a Hybrid Publishing Lab. Alternatively, join in with a variety of mini-projects related to open science, citizen science and open cultural heritage – if you have an activity suitable for a hackday, feel free to bring it along!

This event is open to coders and non-coders alike, so people with all levels of technical proficiency are welcome. Below you can find some more practical information and some more details about the different thing we are going to work with. Excited already? Then click here to sign up right away as places are limited.

Practical Details

  • When: Tuesday 18th September 2012
  • Where: MAKE Space, Aalto University
  • Who: Programmers, Developers, Designers, Digital Humanists, Scientists, Researchers and everybody else with an interest in culture and/or science
  • Costs: Free to attend. (NB: If you wish to attend other OKFest sessions, you will need to purchase an OKFest pass
  • What you need to bring: A laptop and lots of enthusiasm!
  • How to register: Please use this form

Program

1. Cultural Data Hack

Prominent European cultural heritage institutions have agreed to open up specific datasets for use at this hackday.

The Central Art Archives opens a dataset consisting of glass-plate negatives photographed by Daniel Nyblin (1856-1923), and their descriptive data. The set features black and white reproductions of artworks by Nyblin’s contemporary Finnish artists. The files have been photographed from the original glass-plate negatives.

The team at Europeana have also agreed to make available the new version of the Europeana API, making use of Europeana’s new Data Exchange Agreement that secures all metadata within Europeana under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) waiver. For a bit of inspiration what can be done with these datasets you can have a look at previous Europeana hackathons

OpenCultuurData is a Dutch initiative that opens cultural data and encourages the development of valuable cultural applications. They have released several different datasets already and currently run an app-competition until the end of this year. This means that developers who make use of one of these datasets have a chance to win great prizes up to € 3.000! For more info about this competition click here

Other datasets from contributing institutions include:

Many more to come!

2. Edit-a-thon

Wikimedia Finland is a local chapter in the global Wikimedia network. One of their goals is to involve experts to improve Wikipedia, as well as engaging galleries, libraries, archives and museums through GLAM programs. In the Culture Hack Day Wikimedia Finland organizes an edit-a-thon, including some demonstrations of their current projects (e.g. GLAM Atheneum) and sharing practical advice on wiki culture, as well as discussions on how to improve it.

In an edit-a-thon, a group of people come together at a specified time to edit Wikipedia together, usually around a particular topic. In our cultural heritage edit-a-thon a group of participants will collaborate to gather and record cultural heritage information for the Wikipedia. The focus will be mainly on Finnish Wikipedia articles, but many of the openly licensed objects that will be made available during this day, can also be used in Wikipedia for other languages.

3. Open Humanities Hack


The Open Humanities hack will be all about building open source tools for working with open content and open data for use within humanities teaching and research. Leading developers from the emerging “Digital Humanities” domain will join forces to build upon existing tools and forge entirely new creations. Tools that people have already expressed an interest in working on include:

  • TEXTUS

    TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts. It harnesses the power of semantic web technologies and delivers them in a simple and intuitive interface so that students, researchers and teachers can share and collaborate around collections of texts. For a demo version and access to the Github repo see their website

  • Pundit

    Pundit is a novel semantic annotation and augmentation tool. It enables users to create structured data while annotating web pages. Annotations span from simple comments to semantic links to web of data entities (as Freebase.com and Dbpedia.org), to fine granular cross-references and citations. Pundit can be configured to include custom controlled vocabularies. In other words, annotations can refer to precise entities and concepts as well as express precise relations among entities and contents.

  • BibServer

    BibServer is a tool for quickly and easily sharing collections of bibliographic metadata.

4. Open Video Make Session


The Open Video Make Session focuses on open video as a rich resource for creative reinterpretation. Cultural heritage institutions are opening their archives and providing access to various audiovisual content and data online. Recent technical developments also make it easier to mix video with other types of content (see e.g. Popcorn). However, it is still rather complex to take video to the next level beyond traditional remixing, making use of video metadata, open data, and temporal and spatial video characteristics. In order to tackle this challenge, and to promote new uses for archival materials, we aim to open up video as an exploratory medium for a broader audience of potential makers. During the session, invited experts from different fields work with open video content and data, stretching the notion of video to discover novel ways for creative re-use. The outcomes of the session will be published later online in the form of mini tutorials to facilitate further explorations with video.

Welcome to join the session if you are interested to explore video hands on, or just to see the experts at work! If you have further questions, please email Sanna Marttila / sanna.marttila [@] aalto.fi

5. PyBOSSA


PyBossa is an open source platform for crowd-sourcing online (volunteer) assistance to perform tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence (e.g. image classification, transcription, information location etc).

PyBossa was inspired by the BOSSA crowdsourcing engine, but is written in python (hence the name!). It can be used for any distributed tasks application, although it was initially developed to help scientists and other researchers to crowd-source human problem-solving skills. It should be possible to put together a new application in a day, so come along and have a go!

6. Research-oriented software libraries for open data (‘Louhos hack’)


New analysis tools are needed to take full advantage of the new open government data resources in academic research. Solutions can be borrowed from other data-intensive research fields, such as computational biology and economics, where on-line discussion forums and dedicated software libraries have already revolutionized international collaboration and research output. Louhos is a community-driven effort to develop flexible, research-oriented software libraries for open data. The project is coordinated through GitHub, and it provides general-purpose tools to fetch and analyze open government data streams, customized to local standards and needs. We welcome the community to join the effort in this hackathon to extend these tools and discuss the need for open data analytics in academic context.

We also have some more hack ideas bubbling in the pipeline, so keep an eye on the Culture and Science Hackday page for breaking news and latest developments! If you have a project that you would like to bring along to the hackday, please contact educationandresearch [@] okfestival.org or openheritage [@] okfestival.org

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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

OpenDataMx: Open Data Hackathon in Mexico City

August 22, 2012 in External, Featured, Featured Project, Open Data, Open Government Data, School of Data, Sprint / Hackday

 

OpenDataMx

This weekend Mexico City will host OpenDataMx, a Hackathon of public open data lasting 36 hours, during which participants will develop creative technical solutions to solve various civil society problems.

Programmers, designers, members of civil society organizations (CSOs) and government officials are invited to participate in OpenDataMx and collaborate in web and mobile solutions in order to solve particular problems.

This Hackathon is open to all themes and challenges arising from government public data or/and CSOs’ projects. The event will be held on August 24th – 25th, 2012 at the Universidad de la Comunicación in Mexico City.

OpenDataMx will have renowned international judges from the technological, open data, and government transparency fields. There will be three cash prizes to the best solutions according to the following criteria: creativity, analytical depth, communications proposal, and the project’s potential impact in solving the public problem.

With all this, we want OpenDataMx to become an event that has an impact on civil society’s work and can narrow the digital divide between those who are experts in the field and those who need to delve more on it to achieve greater impact in the transformation of a more democratic society.

The Open Knowledge Foundation was invited to talk about their experience in builing the community around open knowledge and open data and will also host a session on using the OpenSpending platform with Mexican data.

Organizers:

  • Fundar, Center for Analysis and Research Social TIC
  • Colectivo por la Transparencia

Invited organizations:

  • Development Seed
  • Open Knowledge Foundation
  • Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente
  • Sunlight Foundation

For more information:

  • http://opendata.mx
  • twitter.com/opendatamx
  • contacto [at] opendata.mx
SocialTIC
Fundar
Collectivo por la transparencia
Universidad de la comunicacion

1 Comment »

Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

Development Data Challenge – London, August 25-26

August 21, 2012 in Events, Open Data, Open Government Data, Sprint / Hackday, WG Development

Where Do Development Questions Meet Development Data?

Development Data Challenge

  • Where: The Guardian (Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1P 2AP)
  • When: Saturday and Sunday, August 25-26 2012

This weekend in London, coders, designers, development experts, data wranglers and interested citizens and invited for the Development Data Challenge in London.

Join us at the Guardian for a weekend of data wrangling, visualising and challenging questions. Bringing together hacks and hackers, developers and development experts, we want to answer interesting and difficult questions about international development – and in the process, demonstrate the value of the amazing amount of new data that is now available.

Do you know of any interesting and relevant datasets? Can you clean and wrangle data? You might be able to turn that data into an awesome app. Maybe you can make data look beautiful and tell an amazing story. Or maybe you just have a great idea.

Please sign up to attend the event: Eventbite page

DDC

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Avatar of Shaun Russell

by Shaun Russell

The very first Open Data and Democracy Initiative Hackathon, South Africa

August 16, 2012 in Events, External, Open Government Data, Sprint / Hackday

If knowledge is power then data are the individual watts; one by itself is aesthetically pleasing, but functionally useless. It’s only when we add all the watts together that we produce enough power to move forward. Constitutionally we own this power, but the trickle of information provided to the public is practically useless – and so the Open data and Democracy Initiative was born: Not to fight against government and the private sector, but to aid them in data liberation; something that has helped empower citizens in other African countries.

We came together as a group of concerned technologists, civil society activists, journalists, data analysts and computer programmers; to find a way to open more important data to the public (like SDAs), and also to show what can be done with this open data, because from anecdotal evidence we found that the power of Open Data is lost on the man in the street. By holding a Hackathon and creating software applications that facilitate social change, we could free ourselves from a common South African problem of talking about solutions without acting, and instead create something tangible and therefore more meaningful.

The results of the hackathon far exceeded my expectations and vindicated our faith in the idea of getting people with problems together with people who can solve them using technology.

So what exactly do we have to show for our good intentions? Looking at 3 of the apps that were created you can judge for yourself.

Non-Profit tracker

Based on the data of over 85,000 non-profits in South Africa, a mapping application was created allowing users to visit a website with a map of South Africa on which all 85 000 registered NGOs were pinpointed in their geographical location. The app lets users find specific NGOs (they can also be filtered into categories), as well as provide contact information for each, making it easy to quickly find the right organisation according to your need and location.

The real power in mapping datasets, however, lies in cross referencing two or more. If we can combine this map of NGOs with a map of health problems we start to see correlations of data. You could for example find that an area with a high HIV level may have a low number of health NGOs, all because two datasets were married. This same technology framework can be used for hospitals and disease, schools and pass rates etc.

SchoolReport

SchoolReport is an app designed to give learners a public platform to report serious issues happening at their school; giving a voice to the voiceless in a crisis ridden education system.

The project started with basic data on schools in the Western Cape, including location, student and teacher numbers, and matriculation results. Departing from their original goal of merely reporting the available data on each individual school, the group incorporated a commenting system where learners can report problems within their school with the view of using this public channel to force positive change in their school. These problems were broken down into different categories (and colour coded for better navigation), namely: buildings, textbooks, corruption, bullying and crime.

SchoolReport is currently in discussions with Equal Education to create a resolution path for the complaints, so that action is taken, instead of just a whole bunch of digital moaning. If successful, SchoolReport could be incorporated into existing social media platforms like Mxit and Facebook, making it easy to report mismanagement of schools and bring about change in areas where it is sorely needed.

ProtestMap

ProtestMap is an app designed to show, graphically, the places where service delivery protests have happened. It was conceived through trying to understand the root causes of a spate of service delivery protests in South Africa, and unsurprisingly a brief search yielded no datasets. Without knowing where it would lead, they created their own geocoded dataset from online news reports, then overlaid this with data from the previous census to try give these protests some kind of context.

The obvious problem is that they needed to collect all the data themselves. With an open database created on a data hub, there is an opportunity for journalists (and whoever else can accumulate statistics on protests) can slowly build a more rigorous dataset of protests around service delivery.

The group aims to continue with the project and provide an open resource for researchers, journalists and policy makers to engage this data and better understand the general trends that fuel protests.

It is difficult to understand the outcomes of our inaugural Hackathon without experiencing the actual apps. But what is clear is that there is a group of people in Cape Town (and the rest of South Africa) who have the skills to help large sectors of marginalised South Africa, and more importantly are willing.

The Open Data and Democracy Initiative is still in its infancy and we are holding an open strategy planning meeting this Friday:

ODADI Strategy Planning open meeting Friday 17th August, 14:00-18:00
Buchanan Square, 160 Sir Lowry (Main) Rd
Woodstock, Cape Town
(secured parking available)

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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

OKFN Energy Lab: Call for Partners

July 25, 2012 in Events, Featured, Linked Open Data, OKF Projects, Sprint / Hackday, Workshop

OKF Energy Lab

OKFN Labs is launching Labs Sprints, a new initiative to create data-driven applications around a specific topic within a very short timeframe – a single week. As we start this, we’re looking for partners to help us frame the questions that our apps will aim to explore. To create such high-impact apps which can serve policy-making, our team needs a partner from the topic area who understands the background and the issue in question and can help us guide in the creations of a meaningful product.

Energy Data is theme for the first OKF Lab, taking place in Berlin 1-8 October, 2012, and bringing together a small team of coders, designers, data wranglers, technologists and policy experts. The theme is structured broadly to incorporate a wide range of sub-topics e.g. renewable energy resources and energy efficiency, fossil fuels and traditional energy structures, electricity demand and supply, government spending around energy policies as well as emissions from energy use in transport, industry, etc.

Open energy data is increasingly recognised by governments as “a powerful input to innovation” that can empower citizens, create jobs, encourage entrepreneurship and foster societal transformations. Access to energy data is also a citizen’s right: publicly-owned machine readable energy information and data should be made available and accessible to all sectors of society.

Creative energy data apps could assist users in forecasting future consumption based on previous usage data, mapping daily electricity consumption peaks and lows, providing web-based tools for emissions data-collection, comparing the efficiency and cost of alternative energy investments or presenting data in an easy-to-understand, interactive and engaging way.

OKF Lab

Organisations that are working in this area are invited to partner with OKFN Labs on presenting a challenge for our team. The partners are expected to provide some support in the process of framing the Energy Lab and present an input in the form of a presentation about current research, policy and technological gaps.

Please contact us with a short e-mail, outlining the challenge in answering the following questions.

  • What is the problem you would like to solve?
  • Which are the groups and relevant audiences?
  • What kind of data would you like to use?

Contact e-mail: sprints [at] okfn.org

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