Comments on: Thinking About Africa’s Open Data

By: Kenya Open Data Initiative: A Developer Perspective | Afrinnovator

Kenya Open Data Initiative: A Developer Perspective | Afrinnovator — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:47:28 +0000

[…] initiative, KODI, to the public – a first in Africa and a milestone for e-governance in Kenya and Africa. For the first time, this opens up doors to what was previously either inaccessible orÂ hard to […]

By: Open Data, Predictive Analytics and Visualizations â€“ A Game-Changer *iHub_

Open Data, Predictive Analytics and Visualizations â€“ A Game-Changer *iHub_ — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:26:02 +0000

[…] Thinking about Africa’s Open Data […]

By: Mashamugs

Mashamugs — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 10:44:59 +0000

I agree with you that the government isn’t open to its data, am sure they have data dating back to the 40s. you cant just walk in to a ministry’s office as a concerned citizen and seek to acquire any information.
mostly we are left to rely on independent studies and surveys.

By: Louis

Louis — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:58:34 +0000

a while ago i proposed that the government needs an information utility basically a service that collects and managed and makes available all this data sets in form of API’s
http://louismajanja.blogspot.com/2009/02/information-utiity.html

By: Henry C-G

Henry C-G — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 07:42:58 +0000

Have you considered talking to the folks at http://sunlightlabs.com/? They have been doing similar work in the U.S. for a few years now.

By: gmeltdown

gmeltdown — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:15:38 +0000

Great and timely post!

Allow me to propose one more problem we seem to have :- inability to understand the supply chain for Govt. Data for many of us. Eg. Data flow can appear viscous where govt. officials are not trusting of data from their very own systems. That would make them apprehensive to share it. I often had to resist such temptations when I was a govt. official.

Weak entreprise information management systems in govt. may be significant contributors to the problem of data viscosity. There also seems to be a need for many of us to understand the monitoring and evaluation approach that most govt. and donor driven projects use for data management. It seems like a need to appreciate data generated from routine monitoring systems vs data from studies and surveys. This understanding seems important in telling how to visualize/interpret respectively generated statistics.

A critical look at the supply chain of data in GOK might indeed help to isolate the many challenges sitting in the way of success for applications build on govt. data