The Global Open Data Index – an update and the road ahead

The Global Open Data Index is a civil society collaborative effort to track the state of open government data around the world. The survey is designed to assess the openness of specific government datasets according to the Open Definition. Through this initiative, we want to provide a civil society audit of how governments actually publish data with input and review from citizens and organisations. This post describe our future timeline for the project.

Here at Open Knowledge International, we see the Global Open Data Index (aka GODI) as a community effort. Without community contributions and feedback there is no index. This is why it is important for us to keep the community involved in the index as much as we can (see our active forum!). However, in the last couple of months, lots has been going on with GODI. In fact so much was happening that we neglected our duty to report back to our community. So based on your feedback, here is what is going on with GODI 2016:

New Project Management

Katelyn Rogers, who managed the project until January 2017, is now leading the School of Data program. I have stepped in to manage the Index until its launch this year. I am an old veteran to GODI, being its research and community lead for 2014 and 2015, so this is a natural fit for me and the project. This is done with my work as the International Community Coordinator and the Capacity team lead, but fear not, GODI is a priority!

This change in project management allowed us to take some time and modify the way we manage the project internally. We moved all of our current and past tasks: code content and research to the public Github account. You can see our progress on the project here- https://github.com/okfn/opendatasurvey/milestones

Project timeline

Now, after the handover is done, it is easier for us to decide on the road forward for GODI (in coordination with colleagues at the World Wide Web Foundation, which publishes the Open Data Barometer). We are happy to share with you the future timeline and approach of the Index:

Finalising review: In the last 6 weeks, we have been reviewing the different index categories of 94 places. Like last year, we took the thematic reviewer approach, in which each reviewer checked all the countries under one category. We finished the review by March 20th, and we are now running quality assurance for the reviewed submissions, mainly looking for false positives of datasets that have been defined as complying with the Open Definition.

Building the GODI site: This year we paid a lot of attention to the development of our methodology and changed the survey site to reflect it and allow easy customization (see Brook’s blog). We are now finalising the result site so it will have even better user experience than past years.

Launch! The critical piece of information that many of you wanted! We will launch the Index on May 2nd, 2017! And what a launch it is going to be!
Last year we gave a 3 weeks period for government and civil society to review and suggest corrections for our assessment of the Index on the survey app, before publishing the permanent index results. This was not obvious to many, and we got many requests for corrections or clarifications after publishing the final GODI.
This year, we will publish the index results, and data publishers and civil society will have the opportunity to contest the results publicly through our forum for 30 days. We will follow the discussions to decide if we should change some results or not. The GODI team believes that if we are aspiring to be a tool for not only measuring but also for learning open data publication, we need to allow civil society and government to engage around the results in the open. We already see the great engagement of some governments in the review process of GODI (See Mexico and Australia), and we would like to take this even one step further, making this a tool that can help and improve open data publication around the world.

Report: After fixing the Index result, we will publish a report on our learnings from GODI 2016. This is the first time that we will write a report on the Global Open Data Index findings, and we hope that this will help us not only in creating better GODI in the future but also to promote and publish better datasets.

Have any question? Want to know more about the upcoming GODI? Have ideas for improvements? Start a topic in the forum: https://discuss.okfn.org/c/open-data-index/global-open-data-index-2016