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Avatar of Adam Green

by Adam Green

Just 5 days to go for The Public Domain Review Fundraiser!

April 25, 2013 in Featured, Public Domain, Public Domain Review

The Public Domain Review Fundraiser ends on Wednesday 1st May, just 5 days away!

Since we launched the fundraising campaign 7 weeks ago we’ve seen a fantastic response which has got us so far to an amazing 98% of our target… very very nearly there. We are making a final push in these remaining days to make these last few hundred dollars, and we hope maybe also make a substantial leap past our goal!

If you haven’t donated yet but you’d like to be part of the amazing drive we are seeing to keep the project alive, then wait no longer! The time has come.

To learn more about the campaign and make your donation visit:

http://publicdomainreview.org/support/

And remember that if you donate $40 or more you’ll have the opportunity to be receive our beautiful Public Domain Review Tote Bag!

Please also continue to spread the word as much as you can!


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Avatar of Lucy Chambers

by Lucy Chambers

We’re Hiring! School of Data seeks Workshop and Project Coordinator

April 25, 2013 in Join us, School of Data

School of Data is hiring a Workshop and Project Coordinator! See below for details about the role and how to apply.

About School of Data

School of Data works to empower civil society organizations, journalists and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively in their efforts to create fairer and more sustainable societies.

Audience

School of Data focuses on supporting and working with:

  • Data-oriented staff at NGOs & NGOs (as a whole)
  • Potential or actual data-journalists
  • “data geeks who care”

Fundamentally, we care most about people who use data “for good”. While we work globally, we have a particular focus at the present on Latin America and Africa.

About the role

Duties are negotiable, but projected to include tasks such as:

  • Representing the School of Data Project and its various projects and activities at events around the world
  • Working with and supporting our local partners
  • Taking charge of the communications and outreach
  • Organising and facilitating events, workshops and training
  • Soliciting for guest tutorials and blog posts for the school of data blog
  • Writing posts and copy for the website
  • Building the School of Data network around the world, starting in Latin America and Africa school of data logo
  • Developing processes and systems to help support local School of Data Initiatives, including handbooks and governance structures
  • Doing unexpected stuff spontaneously!

This role sits within the Knowledge unit of the the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Person specification

We are looking for someone self-driven, organised and a good communicator. This person should be comfortable running a number of projects at the same time, speaking at events and travelling – sometimes at short notice. We need a gregarious, tech-translator, who can empathise with the needs of NGOs, journalists and engaged citizens and translate the tech to human in order to allow them to start learning.

Experience in working in data-driven projects is essential, and topics such as government spending, procurement, extractive industries etc would be especially welcome.

Candidates with a background in online community management, facilitation or campaigning will be looked upon favourably. Grant-writing, project management and contract-handling experience will be valued.

Location

We will consider applicants based anywhere in the world; however a mild preference is given to those close to one of our hubs in London, Berlin or Cambridge.

Pay & closing date

The rate is negotiable based on experience. This full-time position is available immediately. The closing date for applications is 15th May 2013.

How to apply

To apply please send a cover letter highlighting relevant experience, your CV and a 30-second video explaining your interest in the role to jobs@okfn.org.

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Avatar of Francois Grey

by Francois Grey

Opening up the wisdom of crowds for science

April 22, 2013 in Featured, News, Open Data, Open Science, Our Work, PyBossa, Releases

We are excited to announce the official launch of Crowdcrafting.org, an open source software platform – powered by our Pybossa technology – for developing and sharing projects that rely on the help of thousands of online volunteers.

crowdcrafting logo

At a workshop on Citizen Cyberscience held this week at University of Geneva, a novel open source software platform called Crowdcrafting was officially launched. This platform, which already has attracted thousands of participants during several months of testing, enables the rapid development of online citizen science applications, by both amateur and professional scientists.

Applications already running on Crowdcrafting range from classifying images of magnetic molecules to analyzing tweets about natural disasters. During the testing phase, some 50 new applications have been created, with over 50 more under development. The Crowdcrafting platform is hosted by University of Geneva, and is a joint initiative between the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a Geneva-based partnership co-founded by University of Geneva. The Sloan Foundation has recently awarded a grant to this joint initiative for the further development of the Crowdcrafting platform.

Crowdcrafting fills a valuable niche in the broad spectrum of online citizen science. There are already many citizen science projects that use online volunteers to achieve breakthrough results, in fields as diverse as proteomics and astronomy. These projects often involve hundreds of thousands of dedicated volunteers over many years. The objective of Crowdcrafting is to make it quick and easy for professional scientists as well as amateurs to design and launch their own online citizen science projects. This enables even relatively small projects to get started, which may require the effort of just a hundred volunteers for only a few weeks. Such initiatives may be small on the scale of most online social networks, but they still correspond to many man-years of scientific effort achieved in a short time and at low cost.

“By emphasizing openness and simplicity, Crowdcrafting is lowering the threshold in investment and expertise needed to develop online citizen science projects”, says Guillemette Bolens, Deputy Rector for Research at the University of Geneva. “As a result, dozens of projects are under development, many of them in the digital humanities and data journalism, some of them created by university students, others still by people outside of academia.”

An example occurred after the tropical storm that wreaked havoc in the Philippines late last year. A volunteer initiative called Digital Humanitarian Network used Crowdcrafting to launch a project called Philippines Typhoon. This enabled online volunteers to classify thousands of tweets about the impact of the storm, in order to more rapidly filter information that could be vital to first responders. “We are excited about how Crowdcrafting is assisting the digital volunteer community worldwide in responding to natural disasters,” says Francesco Pisano, Director of Research at UNITAR.

“Crowdcrafting is also enabling the general public to contribute in a direct way to fundamental science,” says Gabriel Aeppli, Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), a joint venture between UCL and Imperial College. A case in point is the project Feynman’s Flowers, set up by researchers at LCN. In this project, volunteers use Crowdcrafting to measure the orientation of magnetic molecules on a crystalline surface. This is part of a fundamental research effort aimed at creating novel nanoscale storage systems for the emerging field of quantum computing.

Commenting on the underlying technology, Rufus Pollock, founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, said, “Crowdcrafting is powered by the open-source PyBossa software, developed by ourselves in collaboration with the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. Its aim is to make it quick and easy to do “crowdsourcing for good” – getting volunteers to help out with tasks such as image classification, transcription and geocoding in relation to scientific and humanitarian projects”. The Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Society Foundations funded much of the early development work for this technology.

Francois Grey, coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, says, “Our goal now, with support from the Sloan Foundation, is to integrate other apps for data collection, processing and storage, to make Crowdcrafting an open-source ecosystem for building a new generation of browser-based citizen science projects.”

For further information about Crowdcrafting, see Crowdcrafting.org.

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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

Reinhart-Rogoff Revisited: Why we need open data in economics

April 22, 2013 in Open Data, Open Economics, WG Economics

 

This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog.

Another economics scandal made the news last week. Harvard Kennedy School professor Carmen Reinhart and Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff argued in their 2010 NBER paper that economic growth slows down when the debt/GDP ratio exceeds the threshold of 90 percent of GDP. These results were also published in one of the most prestigious economics journals – the American Economic Review (AER) – and had a powerful resonance in a period of serious economic and public policy turmoil when governments around the world slashed spending in order to decrease the public deficit and stimulate economic growth.

Carmen Reinhart

Kenneth Rogoff

Yet, they were proven wrong. Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) tried to replicate the results of Reinhart and Rogoff and criticised them on the basis of three reasons:

  • Coding errors: due to a spreadsheet error five countries were excluded completely from the sample resulting in significant error of the average real GDP growth and the debt/GDP ratio in several categories
  • Selective exclusion of available data and data gaps: Reinhart and Rogoff exclude Australia (1946-1950), New Zealand (1946-1949) and Canada (1946-1950). This exclusion is alone responsible for a significant reduction of the estimated real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category
  • Unconventional weighting of summary statistics: the authors do not discuss their decision to weight equally by country rather than by country-year, which could be arbitrary and ignores the issue of serial correlation.

The implications of these results are that countries with high levels of public debt experience only “modestly diminished” average GDP growth rates and as the UMass authors show there is a wide range of GDP growth performances at every level of public debt among the twenty advanced economies in the survey of Reinhart and Rogoff. Even if the negative trend is still visible in the results of the UMass researchers, the data fits the trend very poorly: “low debt and poor growth, and high debt and strong growth, are both reasonably common outcomes.”

Source: Herndon, T., Ash, M. & Pollin, R., “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff, Public Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts: Amherst Working Paper Series. April 2013.

What makes it even more compelling news is that it is all a tale from the state of Massachusetts: distinguished Harvard professors (#1 university in the US) challenged by empiricists from the less known UMAss (#97 university in the US). Then despite the excellent AER data availability policy – which acts as a role model for other journals in economics – the AER has failed to enforce it and make the data and code of Reinhart and Rogoff available to other researchers.

Coding errors happen, yet the greater research misconduct was not allowing other researchers to review and replicate the results through making the data openly available. If the data and code were made available upon publication in 2010, it may not have taken three years to prove these results wrong, which may have influenced the direction of public policy around the world towards stricter austerity measures. Sharing research data means a possibility to replicate and discuss, enabling the scrutiny of research findings as well as improvement and validation of research methods through more scientific enquiry and debate.

Get in Touch

The Open Economics Working Group advocates the release of datasets and code, along with published academic articles, and provides practical assistance to researchers who would like to do so. Get in touch if you would like to learn more by writing us at economics [at] okfn.org and signing up to our mailing list.

References

Herndon, T., Ash, M. & Pollin, R., “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff, Public Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts: Amherst Working Paper Series. April 2013: Link to paper | Link to data and code

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Avatar of Christian Villum

by Christian Villum

Open data highlights from European Data Forum 2013 in Dublin

April 16, 2013 in Events, Featured, LOD2, Open Data

 

Europe’s data league convened in Dublin last week – Open Data increasingly taking the stage

Over 500 data professionals gathered last week at European Data Forum conference in Dublin. This is the annual meeting place for industry, research, policy makers, and community initiatives to discuss the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in Europe. One of the main sentiments throughout the event was a profound interest in openly licensed data and developments in the field of linked data.

The Open Knowledge Foundation was represented by Sander van der Waal and myself, and we took part with reference to the LOD2 project (an EU-funded project on Linked Open Data) and the Apps for Europe project (supporting apps competitions around Europe) – as well as to stimulate open data discussions in general. That seemed to have an increasingly fertile ground, as one of the main sentiments throughout the conference was a profound general interest not only in linking data, but also making them legally and technically open.

Open Data on the political agenda

Irish Minister for Justice, Equality and Defense Alan Shatter was among the first in the official program – which was initiated with a brief video message from EU Vice President Neelie Kroes – to address the need to embrace linked data, rightly calling it the new digital frontier. He seemingly hinted at the need for open technical standards and open licensing to be the norm, by emphasizing the need to change EU data protection regulation to enable maximum gain from the massive opportunities put before us in linking the vast datasets (commonly referred to as Big Data). This notion was supported by Robert Viola, Deputy Director General at European Commission (from Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology) in his subsequent presentation highlighting among other how open data is the optimal way to improve public health systems.

Representatives from the European Commission’s DG Connect (Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology), Malte Beyer-Katzenberger and Francesco Barbato, continued this thought by presenting a concept called the EU Data Value Chain, which is a part of DG Connect’s effort to ensure that digital technologies can help deliver the growth which the EU needs. The initiative is working on creating a European data ecosystem in accordance with EU’s Open Data Policy which covers ao. open government data, public sector information (PSI) and Open Access. The reason for this is the need to pursue untapped business opportunities, ensure better governance and citizen empowerment (through transparency), and the need to address societal changes and accelerate scientific progress. In that regard the European Commission has been pushing members to open up data since the launch of the PSI directive in 2003.

Malte Beyer-Katzenberger also presented the EU Open Data Portal later in the conference program, which we at Open Knowledge Foundation have helped develop. The portal is part of the European open data infrastructure that aggregates metadata from sources across the EU and acts as a single access point which helps to identify what data exists without knowing who is holding them; at the same time, Beyer-Katzenberger noted, it also acts as a driver for re-use policies inside the organization.

Open data as an innovation strategy for industry

The first day of the event also saw the announcement of the winner of the European Data Innovator Award, which was given to Michael Gorriz, CIO of car manufacturer Daimler, for his linked knowledge systems in Mercedes cars. Gorriz explained how data is connecting customers and enterprises more directly – calling it an emerging new economy of crowdsourcing and interaction – and highlighted the enormous business potential of linked open data. Specifically, he stressed the importance getting data and information out of the technical and legal “silos” (referring to proprietary data) in order to create value. This obviously requires not only overcoming the technical challenge, but also the cultural one of adapting to making business and driving innovation through linked and open data. In this argument Gorriz referred specifically to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s principles for linked open data and the need to leverage standards such as RDF and Sparql instead of developing proprietary technologies. As a key point he also urged other business leaders to step into the new economies by building trust and reducing the fear of data transparency – and to dare using linked open data to drive the cultural change of their enterprise.

In the field of energy, Florian Bauer from REEEP (The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership) gave a presentation advocating open data as a way of helping the uptake of clean sustainable energy in society in general. Based on experience from the more than 180 clean energy projects in 58 countries REEEP has supported, Bauer pointed out that the power of open data lies in energy companies avoiding replication of work by having joint access to data, and therefore being able to concentrate resources on their own expertise and keeping maintenance to a minimum. Additionally, open data allows for lowering CO2 emission by using the data that is already there. However, Bauer explained that this road has only just begun. Connecting data portals through open standards and with interoperability is needed, and the energy sector needs to publish more data – in raw, machine readable formats and under licenses that allow re-use.

Another major industry representative, Chief Engineer of IT at Statoil, Knut Sebastian Tungland (responsible for technology strategies and professional practices), spoke on the second day of the conference and started out by commenting on the main point that he felt he would take from the conference: namely that they need to act on open data in general, which is not something that he feels they’ve contributed to a lot to so far. In the same breath he expressed the difficulty in doing so and sent out an invitation to help them leverage these ideas – to help them figure out how to share their data.

Open Knowledge Foundation projects enabling innovation

The European Data Forum also featured a presentation by Open Knowledge Foundation (by Sander van der Waal and me) about the publicdata.eu project that has been developed as part of the LOD2-project (focusing on Linked Open Data). The publicdata.eu portal, which runs on the CKAN open source data management system, provides access to open, freely reusable datasets from local, regional and national public bodies across Europe.

The publicdata.eu portal has recently been updated with a new set of social features and visualization capabilities, inviting citizens to examine, discuss and share the datasets; thereby making it easier to find relevant data to use for science, journalism and research in general – as well as for business and app development purposes.

It was highly motivating to see open data being more and more widely acknowledged as a driver of innovation and growth. The Open Knowledge Foundation has been pushing for more openly licensed data for years, and we look forward to working with anyone to further stimulate innovation and wider uptake of openly licensed data and content.

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Avatar of Vanessa Gennarelli

by Vanessa Gennarelli

Data Explorer Mission on Carbon Data

April 11, 2013 in Open Science, School of Data, WG Sustainability

Sign up now for next week’s Data Explorer Mission on Carbon Emissions Data, a pilot initiative of our School of Data and P2PU, to help people explore a topic, while at the same time building their data skills through experimentation and doing.

8364602336_facaa10cdf_oImage CC-By-SA J Brew on Flickr

At the School of Data, we teach in two ways.

1) By producing materials to help people tackle working with data and 2) By running Data Expeditions – where learners tackle a problem, answer a question or work on a project together, learning from one another as they get hands on with real data.

It’s come to our attention, that sometimes, it’s handy to combine the two – handing people materials to tackle the challenges they are likely to encounter along the way. The Data Explorer Mission is like a data expedition with one crucial difference: your guide is a robot…

Read on to learn more…

Your Mission: Tell Stories with Carbon Data

Learn how to tinker with, refine and tell a story with data in this 4-week course. Each week you’ll be commissioned to work with others on a project that will hone your data-wrangling skills. Lessons will be pulled from Open Knowledge Foundation and Tactical Tech with help from Peer 2 Peer University. At the end of the course, you will have finessed, wrangled, cleaned and visualized a data set and shared it with the world.

What to Expect

The course will run April 15 to May 3, and each week your team will receive weekly “Missions” from Mission Control over email. You’ll work together on those projects, including a 30-minute Google Hangout each week. Each “Mission” will lead up to your final project. For each skill you master in the course, you can earn a Badge to show your mastery and to get feedback to further your talents.

The Topic

Carbon Emissions. Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about them at the moment, you don’t need to be a topic expert and the data skills you will learn will be very transferrable to other areas!

The Level

No prior experience is required, we’ll cover spreadsheets and working with data. If you’re more advanced, you are also welcome to join us to hone your skills, and the only limit on what you can learn is your imagination – so if you’re prepared to push yourselves on the project front the data-skills-bucket is your oyster!

About Mission Control

Normally – Data Expeditions are guided by a human sherpa, in this course, we’re weaving School of Data course material with a robot sherpa to help guide participants through the phases of the expedition. You’ll need to listen out for Mission Control’s instructions to guide you through the phases, keep timing and look out for handy tips, but organising your team is up to your group…

Sign up by completing the form below!

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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

Open Research Data Handbook – Call for case Studies

April 9, 2013 in Featured, OKF Projects, Open Access, Open Science

The OKF Open Research Data Handbook – a collaborative and volunteer-led guide to Open Research Data practices – is beginning to take shape and we need you! We’re looking for case studies showing benefits from open research data: either researchers who have personal stories to share or people with relevant expertise willing to write short sections.

Designed to provide an introduction to open research data, we’re looking to develop a resource that will explain what open research data actually is, the benefits of opening up research data, as well as the processes and tools which researchers need to do so, giving examples from different academic disciplines.

Leading on from a couple of sprints, a few of us are in the process of collating the first few chapters, and we’ll be asking for comment on these soon.

In the meantime, please provide us with case studies to include, or let us know if you are willing to contribute areas of expertise to this handbook.

i want you

We now need your help to gather concrete case studies which detail your experiences of working with Open Research Data. Specifically, we are looking for:

  • Stories of the benefits you have seen as a result of open research data practices
  • Challenges you have faced in open research, and how you overcame them
  • Case studies of tools you have used to share research data or to make it openly available
  • Examples of how failing to follow open research practices has hindered the progress of science, economics, social science, etc.
  • … More ideas from you!

Case studies should be around 200-500 words long. They should be concrete, based on real experiences, and should focus on one specific angle of open research data (you can submit more than one study!).

Please fill out the following form in order to submit a case study:

Link to form

If you have any questions, please contact us on researchhandbook [at] okfn.org

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Avatar of Sander van der Waal

by Sander van der Waal

Challenge launched to promote open data for education

March 20, 2013 in Linked Open Data, Linked Up, OKF Projects

The LinkedUp project is very pleased to announce the launch of the LinkedUp challenge. This is a series of three competitions (Veni, Vidi, and Vici) promoting the innovative use of linked and open data in an educational context.

The LinkedUp team invites anyone, from researchers and students, to developers and businesses, to join the first ‘Veni’ competition. You can participate by building prototypes, demos and innovative tools that exploit, use, integrate or analyse large scale web data for educational use.

Some very attractive prizes are only one reason to join and participate in the challenge. It is also a great opportunity to work with a large, documented repository of linked datasets that the LinkedUp team is putting together. The consortium is also able to offer dedicated access to so far non-public resources. The challenge allows participants to showcase their ideas and solutions to a wide community of researchers and practitioners. For businesses as well as researchers, this will be a great opportunity to present their company and enhance their network. For people working in academia, the challenge will provide a wealth of material and opportunities for experiments and publications.

While the LinkedUp team already identified and connected many educational and non-educational resources to work with, participants can also use and connect their own material or other data sources. Anyone is free to showcase their creativity and solutions as long as the application is relevant to education in the broadest sense of the word. There are also some high profile use cases of established organisations made available that can serve as inspiration for innovative applications. Join today!

Important dates

  • March 2013: Launch of the Challenge
  • May 2013: Release of the comprehensive LinkedUp dataset
  • 27 June 2013: Submission deadline
  • 1 September 2013: Notifications and Nominations
  • 17 September 2013: Presentations and award ceremony

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Avatar of Liliana Bounegru

by Liliana Bounegru

Announcing the School of Data Journalism 2013 in Perugia

March 20, 2013 in Events, School of Data, Workshop

Update 21 March: To register for the School of Data Journalism workshops please fill in your name and email address in this form.

Cross-posted on journalismfestival.com and the OKFN blog.

The European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation are pleased to invite you to Europe’s biggest data journalism event, the School of Data Journalism.

The 2nd edition of the School of Data Journalism is kindly hosted at the International Journalism Festival. Last year’s edition attracted hundreds of journalists and featured a stellar team of panelists and instructors from the New York Times, the Guardian, Deutsche Welle, Duke University, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and ProPublica. This year we return with a leading team of about 20 new and returning panelists and instructors from Reuters, New York Times, Spiegel, Guardian, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and others, and a mix of discussions and hands-on sessions focusing on everything from cross-border data-driven investigative journalism, to emergency reporting and using Excel, the Twitter API, data visualisation and maps for journalism.

The 2013 edition takes place in the beautiful city of Perugia between 24-28 April. Entry to the School of Data Journalism panels and workshops is free.

school_bus_perugia_1.jpg

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

 

1. The State of Data Journalism in 2013 (24 April)

2. Data and Investigations: Collaborating Across Borders (25 April)

3. Data Journalism in Southern European Countries (26 April, co-organised with Ahref and datajournalism.it)

4. Covering Emergencies in the Age of Big Data (27 April)

Speakers:

  • Anthony de Rosa, Social Media Editor, Reuters
  • Aron Pilhofer, Editor of Interactive News, New York Times
  • Dan Sinker, Director, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews
  • Elisabetta Tola, co-founder Formicablu, data journalism trainer
  • Friedrich Lindenberg, OpenNews Fellow, Spiegel Online
  • Guido Romeo, Science Editor, Wired Italy, Ahref
  • Jack Thurston, writer, broadcaster and co-founder of Farmsubsidy.org and Fishsubsidy.org
  • James Ball, data journalist, Guardian
  • Mar Cabra, multimedia investigative journalist
  • Marko Rakar, president of Windmill, blogger and data journalist
  • Paul Radu, Executive Director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting  Project, Co-founder of the Investigative Dashboard concept

Moderators:

  • Guido Romeo, Science Editor, Wired Italy, Ahref
  • Liliana Bounegru, Project lead Data Driven Journalism, European Journalism Centre
  • Lucy Chambers, Head of Knowledge, Open Knowledge Foundation
  • Rina Tsubaki, Project lead Emergency Journalism, European Journalism Centre


WORKSHOPS

 

1. Excel for Journalism with Steve Doig  (24 April)

2. Using the Twitter API for Journalism (25 April)

3. Making Data Visualisations: A Survival Guide (26 April)

4. Data Visualisation, Maps and Timelines on a Shoestring (27 April)

Instructors:

  • Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism, Professor, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism
  • Michael Bauer, School of Data, Open Knowledge Foundation
  • Gregor Aisch, award-winning freelance data visualisation expert

The full description of the sessions can be found on the International Journalism Festival website.

How to register

There is no fee to attend the workshops but there is a limited number of available seats and they will be given out on a first-come first-served basis.More information about the registration process for the four workshops will be available in the coming days. Registration is not necessary for attending the panel discussions.

What do you need to bring?

Enthusiasm and a laptop are required for the workshop sessions. Please note for hands-on workshops tablet devices will not be appropriate.

Questions?

If you have questions about the School of Data Journalism get in touch with the coordinators: Liliana Bounegru or Lucy Chambers.

 

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Avatar of Lucy Chambers

by Lucy Chambers

AfricanSpending – Monitoring the Money in Africa

March 18, 2013 in Featured, Open Spending

The Open Knowledge Foundation, in partnership with the Open Institute in Kenya and the African Media Initiative have submitted a proposal to the Knight News Challenge on Open Government: AfricanSpending – Monitoring the Money. We want to build a platform (leveraging OpenSpending) for journalists and civil society to track public money and mineral wealth across Africa to combat cronyism and corruption.

You can read the full proposal on the Knight News Challenge Website and if you like it – please applaud it! From tomorrow, you will also be able to provide feedback on the proposals.

Read more on the proposal below!

Summary

We’ll build a community-driven platform with data resources (leveraging OpenSpending) for journalists and civil society to track public money and mineral wealth, plus related contracts and services, across Africa to combat cronyism and corruption.

In a nutshell

AfricanSpending from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

Tracking and monitoring government finances – including those related to mineral wealth – are a major issue across Africa and much of the rest of the Global South. Journalists, civil society organizations and citizens, could and should play a large role in holding Governments to account by following the money.

Unfortunately, African journalists and citizen groups seldom have the fiscal insight or technical skill to “map the money”. As a result, media coverage and public debate is shallow, reactive, and often fails to hold government to account or tell citizens how government action impacts their personal and local lives.

This project is about dramatically improving this situation.

We propose three key aspects of the project work:

1. The Technology Platform

We’ll customize and extend the functionality and ease-of-use on the www.OpenSpending.org platform, to better track Government money and contracts across Africa. Being able to cover government activity related to the extractive industries and mineral wealth is key. Improving the way that OpenSpending analyses contracts, so that agreements and money flows can be linked, will therefore be a central focus.

We’ll also work to improve the ability to link money to people and organizations, enhancing and developing the existing work linking OpenSpending and OpenCorporates, as well as our existing work to link newsroom platforms such as Document Cloud and Poderopedia.

Third, we’ll work to improve the relevance and accessibility of the resulting data that will allow citizens to compare the ‘real world’ value of expenditure or contracts, across regions or cities, or between planned and actual expenditure (we can take inspiration here from work like GM’s Carbon Footprint toolkit.

By building on the existing OpenSpending platform, and its world-wide user-group, we’ll be able to leverage existing technology and ensure our work benefits not just Africa or this project, but a global community.

2. Getting The Data

Whilst the platform will make it much easier for journalists and others to access and understand financial information, it will be of little value if it contains little or no data! A second element of our work will therefore be dedicated effort to obtain and process key Government financial information from as many countries as possible. We’ve already done substantial work here (Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, etc), and run regular DataLiberation Scraperthons and dBootcamp workshops through the 13 African HacksHackers.com chapters that form part of our network.

We also have working relationships with groups with relevant knowledge and skills elsewhere (e.g. Nigeria BudgIT and Revenue Watch on extractives, etc) and are assisting the 14-member African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) with their investigation into the African extractives industry.

3. Education, Community Building & Engagement

A platform and data have no value if they are not used. The final, essential, part of our work will be developing the awareness and capacity in key communities of journalists, CSOs and civic coders. To do this we will:

  • Build on what’s there: we are already the lead organizer for the HacksHackers community in Africa (2,000 plus members in 13 chapters) and the Code for Africa initiative, that coordinates the largest open data and open government initiatives in Africa through partnerships with the African Media Initiative, World Bank, and Google. We also have good connections with other CSOs working on finance, transparency and extractives across the continent
  • Offer immersive training in the form of ‘Spending Bootcamps’. Hit and run training has little impact. Our bootcamps, modelled on our existing and successful dBootcamps, will therefore be structured as an investigative process that runs over three months each and helps participants build multi-disciplinary teams (of journalists, technologists, and CSO experts), find data (through DataLiberation Scraperthons), and then build projects (at the dBootcamps) that can be deployed in the real world — all while learning to use new tools.
  • Manage a [lightweight] fellowship programme: in environments with severe skills and resource challenges, you need champions who can serve as catalysts and ‘enablers’ to help kickstart mass uptake of new tools or resources. We will therefore run a fellowship programme for 12 annual Spending Fellows, who will initially spend three months each with the core OpenSpending team for intense hands-on training and mentorship, whereafter they will return to be embedded into thought-leader media and civil society organisations. Their focus will be to produce compelling journalism and meaningful civic engagement initiatives from spending data. Going beyond geek tools, we will stress pragmatic ways to demystify budgets and to give “actionable information” that ordinary citizens understand and care about.

Who Are Our Target Audiences?

We’ll serve four audiences: journalists who want to use the site to improve the way they report on government activity, civil society organisations who want the tools and information to run “evidence-based” campaigns, civic hackers who want to use our data or resources to build thier own tools to improve government and empower citizens, and, finally, ordinary citizens who want easy access to “actionable” and customisable versions of their country’s spending information.

We’ll reach the journalists through the growing network of Hacks/Hackers chapters across Africa. There are currently 13 of 20 planned chapters, with roughly 2,000 active members, who meet at least once monthly for skills exchanges and collaborative projects. We’ll reach newsrooms, civic hackers and civil society organisations through the Code for Africa initiative, which uses country-based initiatives such as www.Code4Kenya.org to embed data wranglers into media and NGOs with support from an external civic tech lab to help improve the use of digital tools and data resources.

We’ll also bring together our existing networks topic specific experts in the NGO world, such as the local partners of the International Budget Partnership, with journalists and media organisations to help bring topic-specific expertise together with storytelling ability and develop ongoing relationships to help the data flow between organisations.

Who Are the Partners?

AfricanSpending is a consortium of strategic partners, all with proven records for delivering on data and civic engagement initiatives, including:

The African Media Initiative (AMI), which is an industry umbrella association of 600+ of Africa’s largest media companies. AMI currently runs a series of digital innovation programmes, investing almost $2 million annually into supporting digital and data initiatives in newsrooms on the continent. AMI also spearheads the Code for Africa initiative, building active citizenry and open data that goes beyond just open government. AMI will drive the media engagement component of AfricanSpending.

The Open Institute (OI), a Kenya-based think/do tank that specialises in implementing open data and open government initiatives. OI is currently the lead implementing agency on Code4Africa on behalf of the World Bank and AMI, as well as for AMI’s dBootcamp data workshops, and on aspects of its www.AfricanNewsChallenge.org programme. OI will be the lead implementer on AfricanSpending.

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), the originator of OpenSpending and an international leader on open data tools with extensive experience in building dynamic communities and public engagement around public data. OKF will supply the technical platforms for AfricanSpending, and will host the African fellows at its hubs in London & Berlin.

The AfricanSpending Fellowship Programme

Fellows will be selected through a competitive public process, and will be expected to return to their media and/or civil society organizations as both ambassadors and peer-mentors. Fellows will be trained to upload and manage data on the AfricanSpending platform, as well as how to build new engagement tools and visualizations based on local needs.

What Have We Already Built?

The technology base for this project (OpenSpending) is mature and has been extensively used. In addition Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Insitutite & AMI / Code4Africa have already done African-specific work including work in Cameroon and the prototype “AfricaSpending” using national budget data collected for Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Open Institute meanwhile manages an instance of CKAN as an umbrella public data portal for Africa, on behalf of AMI. The data portal, which is used for dBootcamp and other AMI skills programmes, is currently the largest open data source in Africa.

All our code is open source, so will be easy for others in the broader Code4Africa ecosystem to reuse components in different environments, or to integrate our platform with others, such as the Freedom of Information (FOI) request tracking portals already being funded by AMI.

Support the project

You can read the full proposal on the Knight News Challenge Website and if you like it – please applaud it! From tomorrow, you will also be able to provide feedback on the proposals.

Photo credits: David Keats, le Korrigan on Flickr

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