Happy Holidays from NABUUR
December 24, 2010Blooming Bud School in Kalna, India, finally moves to its own building.
April 8, 2011
We had our first network meetup since we graduated from the IS Hub informal network to a Partos-hosted Open for Change platform, and we had a nice mix of familiar and new faces and organisations.
We ended up with plenty of discussions and ideas around three presentations:
- The dreams and the activities of Open for Change as a networking platform by Pelle Aardema.
- The architecture of connecting open data sources to tools and services by Rolf Kleef.
- The development of a service layer of service components as an “app store for development” by Anna Chojnacka and Thomas Bjelkeman.
We tried to focus our discussions on possible ingredients for the Open Data for Development Camp we’re organizing on May 12 and 13 in Amsterdam: networks to reach out to, data sources to include, questions to be answered. And ended with an ambition suggested by Anna and Thomas: how can we make Open for Change scale to a world-wide brand for “the new way to development aid”?
AKVO kindly arranged space in the International Water House, and we mingled with the NGO WASH network who ended their meeting there with a drink to start off the weekend too.
If you’re interested in joining us next time: join our mailing list, or sign up for the Open Data in Development Camp we’re organizing in May!
Open for Change’s vision, mission and plans
Open for Change’s vision is that we will have:
- A connected global development sector in which access is getting far more important than ownership: access to information and knowledge and access to tools for using this information.
- Increasing worldwide collaboration
- More participatory models for changes in organisations, projects and policies.
This will raise new questions around trust, transparency, ownership, and quality, and poses us with two challenges:
- How can we match skills, methods, knowledge and technology
- How can we implement the principles of open access within the sector.
We therefore want to increase access to data, knowledge and software applications within the global development sector, by providing a
To do so we want to provide a platform to:
- exchange knowledge on topics like open source, open data, open standards on both a national and an international level;
- support and promote projects within the Dutch sector; to increase a sector wide understanding of the challenges and benefits of open access to data, knowledge and software;
- set up and (temporary) maintain missing parts of the infrastructure to support such projects.
The website openforchange.info, the Open Data Development Camp and providing a platform for the WASH data that AKVO and DGIS collaborate on are concrete activities (as was this network meetup).
The architecture to connect data to services and tools
With the growing supply of open data sets and apps and tools that can work with different types of data, it becomes hard to match “supply and demand”, to build a website or service. And so we want to develop an architecture that provides easier points of entry for developers and users:
- Open data standards make it easier for tool developers to import or export data for various applications.
- Data registries can gather information about available data sets and data aggregators: what do they offer, in what format, with which license?
- By integrating data sets, tools and standards, we can build a distribution of components that have been tested to be working together.
If we have such a distribution for the development sector, it makes it easier for organisations to choose tools and standards to work with.
- The IATI registry wants to gather data that complies with the IATI standard and has undergone a certain level of quality checks. This will enable countries receiving donations to find the relevant data about development programmes in one place.
- An essential element is that donors provide their data themselves, and basically only register how the data can be accesses in the IATI registry.
- The open nature of such a registry enables the re-use of that meta-data in for instance an Open for Change registry. The focus of that registry can be broader, and also include other open data sets, targeting a different set of users.
A crucial aspect is that a donor need not even know their data is being re-used, but most of all: does not have to do extra work.
An App Store for development
In February, Akvo Foundation and Skoll Global Threats Fund co-convened a meeting in San Francisco on the subject of online services for the development sector.
1%CLUB , Akvo and Text to Change have been discussing this concept of a shared web application store for a while, together with other parties that participate in Open For Change.
Anna shared her story on the San Francisco meeting, and presented the current state of their joint thinking.
In short the idea is to create a web application store for our existing applications. The web app store would be a thin service layer which would enable data exchange between the applications, allow the existing applications to communicate with each other, and provide other shared facilities such as authentication and billing services. The web app store would enable others to create their own web applications that would use this services layer. On top of that we would collaborate around the development processes, testing infrastructure, sharing skills and helping each other.
Read the original blog post by AKVO here:
A shared online services platform for the development sector
