Cheers,
Simon

Cheers,
Mark Oppenneer

I think the biggest issue here is that most organizations have ‘closed’ or ‘private’ as the ‘default’ setting for all their data and often also publications. We need to change this so ‘open’ (and re-usable) is the default and closed becomes the exception.

However, there iss lots of good work going on to make data and datasets more open – here’s an example from the cgiar: http://csi.cgiar.org

there’s also people working on aid data – http://www.aidinfo.org/

here’s a sector example: http://www.conservationcommons.org/

in agricultural research, Gauri mentioned CIARD – whose principles surely apply as much to data as to information that is the main focus of that group.

see more on data on the iaald blog – http://iaald.blogspot.com/search/label/data

in the cgiar, a ‘triple A’ effort is seeking to bring together efforts to make research outputs – data and info – available, accessible and applicable. See http://iaald.blogspot.com/search/label/aaa or http://ictkm.wordpress.com/tag/aaa/

cheers

Peter
http://www.iaald.org

@Mark
Thanks for the link to the platform. Actually I worked for that project on some steps and think it is a promising start. Still it does not offer large open data repositories of EU development work. Are you going to blog about the open development camp. So curious how it will go. Yes would be great to discuss it further.

Also, I didn’t see this site mentioned, so I’ll add it here: http://capacity4dev.ec.europa.eu/. From the site: “EuropeAid’s new open platform for more effective technical cooperation aims at becoming an indispensable tool for development practitioners.” Just found it myself, so I can’t really comment on it fully, but it seems to be in line with the ideas in your post.

Thanks and cheers,
Mark Oppenneer

Thanks for yet another good thought piece. I agree with you that the lack of open data is a big problem at this moment.

I have been working in a development organization for last 8 years; of these, I spent over 7 years working on making sharing/opening information. The idea behind our efforts was not to ask people to start using one big database or same database or even the same internal schema (because in most cases all of these were well in place) but to at least open up the content of the database using agreed standards and protocols. We worked with many of the big partners (or information owners) to define standards (metadata schemas) for exchanging information and looked at the best possible technology for exchange (first XML, now also RSS or RDF).

I must say we have been able to succeed to some extent. One good example is AgriFeeds (http://www.agrifeeds.org) which brings together news and events information in the areas of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, nutrition, and etc from organizations working in these areas. Even though these are just what we would call very simple information types (when compared to statistical or geospatial data), it has been a very long uphill walk. We worked often one-on-one with data providers to “validate” their outputs so that they met the minimum requirements (even of basic RSS!).

You have highlighted some of the problems already – proprietary databases/systems and their lack of appropriate output formats, lack of focus on the bigger picture, etc. One problem that I think we have been facing time and time again is to actually show the information owners (in our case often national/regional repositories) the benefits of sharing/opening up their content. They do not see how sharing across will increase visibility of their information. The silo culture is prevalent (what we have is good enough for us!) and the degree of effort required to open up the content still overrides their understanding of ROI. We have looked at grey literature, learning resources, project information etc. with mixed results. The bottom-line for us has been that we need to do lot of awareness raising through good concrete examples followed up with capacity building/development in “opening up data” (basically training on standards and protocols) and providing them with easy to use tools (data converters such as XSLT,etc.).

I know that other parts of my organization has been working with big standard setting bodies such as SDMX and ISO to set up exchange standards for our own content. But, sometimes, that is not always enough.

I am not sure this is 100% relevant but you may wish to take a look at some of the activities in the area of opening agriculture (in its broadest sense) “information” at:
* Agricultural Information Management Standards – http://www.fao.org/aims/
* Example of information aggregation portal – http://www.gfis.net/
* Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development – http://www.ciard.net/
* Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange – http://sdmx.org/
* Geonetworks (uses ISO 19115) – http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home