Over the last month or two, we’ve made a strategic decision to dedicate a huge part of our work to serve grassroots communities and we’ve increasingly found ourselves thinking about how our work in the Open Data and Open Governance space impacts them. On Thursday November 7th, 2013, we hosted a Google Hangout on Air…
Read articleThe Global Open Data Initiative partners are excited today to share a draft Declaration on Open Data, and welcome comments and feedback on its contents. Open Data has enormous unfulfilled promise to change how governments work and to empower citizenship. Even as more governments and issue experts discover new potential in the public release of data, civil society…
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This is a cross post from Greg Brown Kenya’s open data portal is floundering. Despite the excitement that surrounded its launch in July 2011, the portal has not been updated in eight months, has seen stagnant traffic, and is quickly losing its status as the symbolic leader of open government in Africa. For a number of reasons,…
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Authored by Nick Hargreaves and cross posted from his blog. It’s slightly over two years since the government of Kenya launched the Kenya Open Data portal; a move that was hailed around the globe and seen by many as a path towards transparency in a corruption ridden government. Kenya became the second, after Morocco, in…
Read articleAfrican Data Journalists and Code for Africa Hacktavists this week traveled to Nepal to be part of the country’s Open Data Initiative launch. The grassroots initiative dubbed Open Nepal week, is a series of week-long activities that is aimed to catalyze and spur the Open Data Movement in Nepal. The week began with a Media…
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The Open Institute is excited to announce the Global Open Data Initiative, which it is spearheading together with the Sunlight Foundation, Worldwide Web Foundation, Open Knowledge Foundation and Fundar. The Open Data Movement globally has grown exponentially over the past four years. In the last two years, it has gained significant momentum in Africa – starting…
Read article Perhaps to answer the question we should start by reviewing what we hoped to do when we started the process. The KODI task force had four streams of activities: Gathering & collating data – At the time that we started this process, any data that the government had, was in disparate places – mostly in…
Read articleBelow the speech delivered by Jay Bhalla, Executive Director of The Open Institute Trust, during the Code4Kenya Launch Event held on the 24th of January 2013. A very good morning to everyone. It’s been slightly over a year and a half since Kenya embarked on its ambitious Open Data Initiative. At the time there were great hopes…
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The Open Institute is really proud to have helped birth an exciting new viral web campaign that is driving Kenyans to register and go vote.The GotToVote! campaign is the latest civic engagement project built by the pioneering Code4Kenya initiative. It was built in just 24hrs, by just two people, based on important but almost unusable…
Read articleThis weekend, leading lights in the global Open Data scene will attend the Open Africa Summit, a “Think/Do” meeting to be held in Zanzibar between October 6 – 9, to help finalise plans for a major new Open Africa initiative. Organised by the African Media Initiative in partnership with the US State Department and the World…
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