Photo: Desola Lanre-Ologun at Unsplash

Last December, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) released the Open Data Editor (ODE), an open source desktop application for data practitioners to explore and find errors in tables. 

What makes this software unique is its target audience: people who don’t have a technical background and don’t know code, formulas or programming languages. Last year, during the final testing phase, we worked with journalists and human rights activists to understand how ODE could be integrated into their workflows. And now we want to work together with more non-technical profiles, such as social workers, government officials, etc.

Today the Open Knowledge Foundation is launching a new pilot programme: we are inviting organisations from any geography and any area of expertise to express interest in participating in a four-month funded pilot. The task is to learn how to integrate Open Data Editor into your work and improve the tool’s components while doing so.

Examples of how ODE can help your daily work:

📊 If you have huge spreadsheets with data obtained through forms with the communities you serve, ODE helps you detect errors in this data to understand what needs to be fixed.

🧑🏽‍🍼 If you manage databases related to child malnutrition (just an example, it could be any social issue), ODE can quickly check if there are empty rows or missing cells in the data collected by different social workers and help you better allocate family assistance.

🏦 If you monitor and review government spending or public budgets for a particular department, ODE helps you find errors in the table and make the data ready for analysis.

Check out the details of the call and see how you can register your interest below:

Call for Pilot Organisations

Target

The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for five high-impact organisations to integrate the Open Data Editor into their workflow. The selected organisations will be part of a first cohort (with a second one scheduled later in the year) and distributed across disciplines and geographies. Our goal is to improve the tool to fit their needs and show a collection of applied uses of ODE.

Eligibility

The selected organisations can:

• Operate in any geography.
• Specialise in any area of knowledge (health, education, socio-economic indicators, transport, research institutions, etc.).
• Have any legal status (non-governmental, civil society, independent collective, public institution, or part of a government).
• Be small or medium-sized, whose work has the agility of a human scale.

The selected organisations must: 

• Have concrete purpose and outcomes for integrating the Open Data Editor into their work.
• Have a non-technical team or group of collaborators who work with data without coding-skills.
• Be able to communicate in English (at least one team member serving as a point of contact).

Commitments

The selected organisations will commit to:

• Integrate Open Data Editor into their workflow under OKFN guidance. 
• Conduct a thorough assessment of the Open Data Editor.
• Participate in bimonthly pilot cohort calls.
• Tell the story of what for and how they deployed the tool.
• Engage in events run by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

(More detailed commitments will form part of a Memorandum of Understanding to be signed as part of the collaboration.)

Compensation & Benefits

The selected organisations will:

• Receive up to USD 5,000 to support their four-month collaboration with the Open Knowledge Foundation.
• Gain data literacy training and tailored support from OKFN, hands-on experience with ODE, and exposure to the Open Knowledge community.
• Help shape the future of a tool designed to make data workflows more accessible and efficient.
• Contribute to the development of your sector and beyond.

Timeline

This pilot programme will start on 3 March, 2025 with an inception meeting in mid-February (date to be defined). The programme is expected to be completed by June 2025.

Expressing your interest

Organisations have until 10 February, 2025 to express their interest. The selected ones will be contacted on a rolling basis until 17 February, 2025.

To express your interest, please fill in this online form. It’s very quick: just a few simple questions to get to know you and understand why the Open Data Editor can make a difference for your work. 

Contact

If you have any questions or want any additional information, you can contact us at info@okfn.org.

Join us for this exciting opportunity to co-create and refine the Open Data Editor, while streamlining your internal work and increasing your social impact!