Highlights from our collaborations
Open Budget Survey
In January the International Budget Partnership (IBP) published the
Open Budget Survey (OBS) 2017
with an interactive Data Explorer developed for IBP by Open Knowledge International and updated with a number of technical and user experience improvements for 2018.
The OBS is the world’s only independent, comparative assessment of the three pillars of public budget accountability: transparency, oversight and public participation.
The
Data Explorer
, first created by Open Knowledge International in 2006 and updated for the release of this year’s survey, allows users to visualise the data from current and previous surveys in a number of different ways.
Open Budget Survey Data Explorer,
Timeline view
Citizen-generated data research
This year we worked with King’s College London and the Public Data Lab to produce
Advancing Sustainability Together? Citizen-Generated Data and the Sustainable Development Goals
, a report for the
Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data
. The work was designed to kick-start conversations around the different approaches of doing and organising citizen-generated data (CGD). When CGD becomes good enough depends on the purpose it is used for but also how CGD is situated in relation to other data.
The report identifies several benefits CGD can bring for implementing and monitoring the SDGs, underlining the importance for public institutions to further support these initiatives.
Alongside the main report, we produced a number of other resources to support researchers and practitioners in this field. Firstly a
guide
for everyone interested in engaging with CGD. And secondly we gathered a
list of more than 200 organisations, programs, and projects working on CGD
, a raw dataset of “citizen generated data” derived from Google searches
accessible on figshare
, a presentation slidedeck and a
Zotero group
collating relevant literature.
Measurement guide
In May 2018 the
Open Data Charter Measurement Guide
was launched, a collaborative effort of the Charter’s Measurement and Accountability Working Group (MAWG), co-chaired by Ana Brandusescu (Web Foundation) and Danny Lämmerhirt (Open Knowledge International). It analyses the Open Data Charter principles and how they are assessed based on current open government data measurement tools. Governments, civil society, journalists, and researchers may use it to better understand how they can measure open data activities according to the Charter principles.
The Measurement Guide is available online in the form of a Gitbook and in a printable PDF version. People interested in using the indicators to measure open data can visit the indicator tables for each principle, or find the guide’s raw data here.
OpenGLAM
OpenGLAM is a global network of people and organisations who are working to open up content and data held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Community members from Wikimedia, Open Knowledge International and Creative Commons joined forces in the spring of 2018 to reinvigorate the OpenGLAM initiative. As a first step, contributors from different parts of the world were invited to share curation of the
@openglam Twitter account
to showcase and highlight the way in which OpenGLAM is being understood in different contexts. A second step was the creation of a survey to check up on the continued impact of the
OpenGLAM Principles
: over a hundred responses were received. In 2019, the community looks forward to updating the principles and the website, as well as having monthly OpenGLAM calls open to everyone working in the OpenGLAM field to join.
Route-TO-PA
The
Raising Open and User-friendly Transparency-Enabling Technologies fOr Public Administrations project
(Route-TO-PA) saw us working as part of an 11 partner network aiming to make it easier to socially interact online about open data. The project supported municipalities in their approach of using the tools SPOD (Social Platform for Open Data) and TET (Transparency-Enhancing Toolset) and included them in projects around open data. In 2018 the project was successfully completed: two of the results were selected for the European Commission’s Innovation Radar platform which promotes great EU-funded innovations:
Following the project end, the
ROUTE-TO-PA Working Group
aims to continue to exploit the project results on a voluntary basis while at the same time promote open data in European public administrations.
OECD
We worked with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to deliver in-person training and dissemination workshop to the core developer/maintainer teams at a team summit at the end of August. This introduced the team to best practices for open source development and helped them with best practices and recommendations on how to set up their project as an open source software development project.
UNHCR
We worked with the United Nations Refugees Agency (UNHCR) to build a globally-supported, centralised and secure data repository that will ensure that their team is able to use its valuable raw data to its full potential, make it available externally for our various operational partners, project stakeholders or academia, and preserving it for future use.
The project aims to retain and archive data for future use, prevent permanent loss, enable repurposing and reproducibility but also to avoid duplication and waste of resources and promote data privacy and data security. We look forward to collaborating on phase two of the project in 2019.
Rockefeller Foundation
We worked with the Rockefeller Foundation on data strategy and technical implementation to support their data outputs from funded research. The goals of the engagement so far have been to assist on socialisation of open data, data-driven research and use of data internally, as well as providing assistance with the setup and delivery of their CKAN-based data portal.