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Next Frontier Low and Middle Income Countries A proposal from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative Funded by:

Next Open Data frontier: Low and Middle income countries

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Last year we witnessed an impressive expansion of Open Government Data initiatives all around the world. We can assert without any doubt that it was clearly the year when Open Government spread throughout the world. However, if we look at the map of the Open Government Data initiatives worldwide, we immediately detect than almost all of these initiatives incubated around Western Europe and North America. There is a big gap in the map, especially with reference to the developing countries. The Challenge Given the apparent benefits of Open Government Data programs, it is important to consider the development of similar programmes all over the world, and particularly in low and middle-income countries. But first, we need to go one step back and ask ourselves how we analyse if a given country is ready to engage and sustain an OGD programme, and how much we know from existing initiatives. The World Wide Web Foundation took the first steps in this direction by conducting an assessment of the feasibility and potential of an OGD program in two countries – Chile and Ghana. The bottom line questions were: - Is the country ready to engage in an OGD initiative? - If so, what support might they need? - If not, why not, and what lesson can we take away from this assessment? But while we were trying to give answers to these questions, new important questions arose: - What pre-conditions exist? - How much of what we know from existing initiatives is applicable? - What are the indicators that will enable the definition of OGD readiness in a given country? We decided to start by developing a new methodology for OGD readiness assessment, based on our experience and a previous study commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Becky Hogge from early 2010. For the assessment completion, we developed a questionnaire and conducted desk research and country visits to interview people and organisations that may be key to any future success. The findings from the studies have enabled us to start a global debate that we aim to carry forward.

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  • 1. Next FrontierLow and Middle IncomeCountriesA proposal from the Transparency and Accountability InitiativeFunded by:

2. OGD over the worldTime to consider OGD programs all over the world,particularly low and middle-income countriessource: http://datos.fundacionctic.org/sandbox/catalog/faceted/ 3. How all this began?Most of the things were already in placei.e. political willingness, IT infrastructure, capacity etc. 4. Need to go one step backHow to know if a given country is ready toengage and maintain an OGD programme? What is needed? How much of what we know from existinginitiatives is applicable? What are the indicators that will enable thedefinition of OGD readiness in a givencountry? 5. Several topics to coverAnalysis of a complex set of indicators Economical and business enviroment Social enviroment Institutional and political environment Scientific-Technological Framework Openess 6. Corruption is everywhere, fromthe airport to the officersEducation Ministry website isdown since last 5 months 7. Lots of questions Is democracy well founded in the country? Is the political top-level layer ready tofacilitate an OGD initiative? What level of data collection does thegovernment currently undertake? What is the Internet connectivity level? What is the education and literacy level inthe country? 8. We need the answers Objective statistical information Desk research Literature review Questionnaires In-country visits In-person or phone interviews 9. Top level Government. Middle layers. International Institutions. Civil hackers and Activists. Private Business. Press and Media. University. NGOs and non-profit.It has to start at the top, it has tostart in the middle and it has to startat the bottom. Tim Berners-Lee 10. OGD Readiness AssessmentFramework 11. People dont like to be taggedwithout permission 12. Open issues Still a work in progress Iterative process Would like to start discussion Currently around 70 indicators Just 4 use cases so far Need more use cases Statistical refinement e.g. correlation analysis 13. Some referencesOGD @ Web Foundationhttp://www.webfoundation.org/projects/ogd/OGD @ CTIC CThttp://datos.fundacionctic.org/Contact:Aman Grewal [email protected] Iglesias [email protected]