Open for Change

The Open Aid Data conference, organized by OpenAid, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Transparency International Germany, will bring together practitioners from various organizations for discussion and exchange about new solutions, and about how technology, the Internet, and particular open data can make aid more transparent – because not all of the money is spent effectively.

Prior to the conference, a Hackday will be organized on the 28th of September at the Böll-Foundation in Berlin to bring developers together to experiment on technical and data solutions to improve development aid. Programmers, designers, coders and others who want to learn more about the field of development aid and would like to share their wisdom are invited to join this hackday. In the morning you will be introduced to the theme, and then brainstorm on possible approaches to making aid more transparent. The rest of the day will be spent working through a code sprint on a real solution. Be part of the event!

The Open Aid Data Conference is part of a range of activities around open aid data worldwide, such as the recent Open Data for Development conference in Amsterdam or a Barcamp in Kathmandu for aid transparency.

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.