The Open Data Day 2016  was successfully hosted and celebrated in Cameroon by the netsquared Yaoundé community.  The theme of the day was ‘Empowering Cameroonians to accelerate open data’, bringing together 90 participants.

The event was hosted in Paraclete Institute in Yaoundé, which brought together multiple stakeholders and students, to empower them in advancing open data in this part of the world.

The event started at 3pm with a theoretical session and ended with a practical workshop at 7pm.

The theoretical session was hosted to shared with participants the basic concept of open data, its importance, and how it could be accelerated. This was demonstrated through a powerpoint presentation from panel members who shared examples of the impact of open data on government intermediaries, education and agriculture in strengthening citizen engagement. And the importance of the release of data sets.

This event help to encourage participants to use open data for local content development in Cameroon,  showing how data could be made available for everyone to use, especially government data.

The key concept was resourcing technologies that could be used for smart visualization of data and how data could be made available on a database for everyone to use to encourage innovative collaboration. We also discovered that most data has not been made accessible in Cameroon.f In order to encourage innovation, transparency, and collaboration we need to advance the open data movement in Cameroon,

The practical workshop empowered participants to blog about data andto share it for reuseIt can be distributed on a platform like internet database website using blogg.com and other blogging sites like simplesite.com.

We also made them to understand that research data must be made available for people to reuse and distributed for everyone to visualize it. We also empower them on how they can  made their data  available  socially, teaching participants that they can share data from blogs to other communication platforms or social media platforms  like Facebook, Twitter and Google  

The event was appreciated by every participant.