Today, we are delighted to announce the selected organisations for a new pilot programme of the Open Data Editor (ODE), Open Knowledge’s new open source desktop application for data practitioners to detect errors in tables. Since we opened the call for applications last January, we’ve received 71 applications in total, and we couldn’t be more inspired by the level of interest in testing it.
The applications came from 41 different countries and organisations with a wide range of data practices. The Open Data Editor has the potential to be a useful tool for working with different types of datasets, such as climate, gender, infrastructure, health, genomic, GLAM, digital literacy, public sector data and government accountability, among others.
Our goal this year is to enhance digital literacy through no-code tools. Using Open Data Editor helps to fill the literacy gap for people and teams in non-technological sectors. The selected organisations will work closely with our team from March to June 2025, integrating the application into their internal workflows and thus informing the next development steps through their use. And while doing so, they will gain lasting data skills across their institutions.
We are impressed by the vital work those organisations are doing in their fields. We hope that better data will enhance this work through no-code tools like the Open Data Editor. We’re looking forward to seeing ODE in action to help solve real-life problems.
Read more about the pilot organisations below, in alphabetical order:
- Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya Initiative (BHKi)
- City of Zagreb
- The Demography Project
- Observatoire des armements / CDRPC
- Open Knowledge Nepal
Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya Initiative (BHKi) will be working with genomic data and metadata
Country: 🇰🇪 Kenya
Area of Knowledge: Computational Biology
Targeted Datasets: Genomic data and metadata, and Community data
Staff and students at the BHKi campus outreach at the University of Nairobi. Photo: BHKi (source)
Pauline Karega, Coordinator
- What will you use the Open Data Editor for?
“We will explore the use of ODE to curate and harmonise genomic data and metadata, and community data. Additionally, we will gather information on bioinformatics/computational biology learners, who collect and use this data, and their experiences with the data. Our goal is to track their needs and interests across East Africa, to better inform outreach activities.”
- Why is a no-code tool useful for you?
“We have a big community of students and researchers doing fieldwork who are new to data collection and have minimal resources, but need to accurately collect, store and communicate data to others. This tool can be a gentle introduction to practice as they learn advanced coding skills to curate and work on the data.”
City of Zagreb will tackle the challenges of working with infrastructure data
Country: 🇭🇷 Croatia
Area of Knowledge: Public Administration
Targeted Datasets: Infrastructure data
ZG HACKL – Hackathon for Open Zagreb 2024 (source)
Kristian Ravic, Senior advisor
- What will you use the Open Data Editor for?
“ODE will be used for bridging interoperability challenges within our existing (open) data infrastructure, ensuring frictionless data exchange between various data platforms, data sources and data formats. We will use ODE to standardise open data processes and data management procedures by improving data transformation and data validation processes and publishing of open data on multiple data platforms.”
- Why is a no-code tool useful for you?
“Currently, we have a non-technical data team with low or no-coding skills. So, there is a skill-gap within our organization and a tool like ODE would help us be more efficient in connecting various data (re)sources and, thus publishing more high value datasets on our central open data platform.”
The Demography Project will focus on water, air quality and electoral data
Country: 🇰🇪 Kenya
Area of Knowledge: Environmental Justice
Targeted Datasets: Water and Air quality data, and Electoral data
Flagging off of the 2024 Ondiri Wetlands Conservation Run in Kikuyu Municipality. Photo: The Demography Project (source)
Richard Muraya, Executive Director
- What will you use the Open Data Editor for?
“ODE is a welcome opportunity for enhanced data quality of our environmental monitoring projects as well as our electoral/parliamentary monitoring project. We intend to deploy ODE to analyse large open government and citizen-generated datasets on atmospheric (air quality) and freshwater resources for enhanced personal and collective responsibility over rapidly degrading natural resources in Kenya.”
- Why is a no-code tool useful for you?
“We are a small team of determined volunteer citizen scientists, environmental journalists and innovators with inadequate technical expertise in programming or advanced computing techniques. A no-code tool will truly be a game-changer in how my team reviews and validates our tabulated environmental datasets to identify trends and errors and ultimately publish our outputs for collective climate action.”
Observatoire des armements / CDRPC will work with defence spending data
Country: 🇫🇷 France
Area of Knowledge: Weapon Monitoring
Targeted Datasets: Arms and defence expenditure databases
Act for nuclear disarmament in partnership with several organisations. Photo: Guy Dechesne (source)
Sayat Topuzogullari, Coordinator
- What will you use the Open Data Editor for?
“We are setting up a monitoring network of arms companies, the Weapon Watch Open Data Environment platform to monitor public and private spending on defence and armaments. It will be used by researchers, journalists, investigators, parliamentarians, whistleblowers and activists across Europe. In this context, we need a simple data entry tool, suitable for people who are not computer literate.”
- Why is a no-code tool useful for you?
“Our monitoring network aims to involve as many people as possible in defense and security issues, a taboo subject in France. For this reason, it’s essential to offer an easy tool for finding errors in databases and improving data quality.”
Open Knowledge Nepal will work together with local governments and their infrastructure data
Country: 🇳🇵 Nepal
Area of Knowledge: Government Data
Targeted Datasets: Infrastructure data (local governments)
Moment of the Data Hackdays 2024 in Kathmandu. Photo: OKNP (source)
Nikesh Balami, CEO
- What will you use the Open Data Editor for?
“We plan to integrate ODE into the IDMS project workflow, a system that allows local governments to store, update, and access ready-to-use data. We will use it to audit existing system datasets, identify errors, and enhance data quality. The goal is to ensure citizens have access to high-quality information. Additionally, we will localise ODE user guides in the Nepali language to assist local government and non-technical users in learning how to use the tool effectively.”
- Why is a no-code tool useful for you?
“ODE will empower non-technical staff to identify, clean, and validate data without requiring coding skills. By allowing municipal staff to handle data errors directly, it will reduce the burden on technical teams and improve data efficiency. The current manual data cleaning process is time-consuming, and introducing a no-code tool like ODE will simplify and streamline workflows, saving time and resources while ensuring high-quality datasets.”
Features to simplify your work
Above you learned what these organisations will do with ODE. But you can also download it now and try it out for yourself. ODE is an open, free desktop application, available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Here are a few tasks that ODE can help you with:
📊 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 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 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.
The Open Data Editor helps you find errors in your tables and spreadsheets
A big thanks again to all organisations that applied for the pilot programme! We will be launching another call for a second cohort in May 2025, and we strongly encourage those who were not selected to apply again. We know a lot of you spend much more time than you desire cleaning up the data before starting to do the work that is really of interest to you. ODE is here to help.
If you have any questions or want any additional information about ODE, you can contact us at info@okfn.org.
Funding
All of Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor is made possible thanks to a charitable grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Learn more about its funding programmes here.
