[euopendata] Open data and the NGOs

[Peter Krantz]

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 11:15, Antti Poikola <antti.poikola at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What kind of data the NGOs could generally make open?
> What kind of open data the NGOs could use?

NGOs may share a similar issue with public sector orgs:
accountability. Some of them receive money from donors who want to
know how it was spent. In Sweden we are about to release open aid data
shortly with the ambition to provide transparency on how and where it
was spent.

This may be beneficial both to donors and to people in the recipient
countries who may be unaware of the amounts and initiatives. If money
is lost to corruption along the road open data from NGOs may be a tool
for the press in the recipient country I guess ("where are the 30
wells that were supposed to be drilled by X?").

So, data about projects would be one thing. For each project, data
about locations, amounts, timespans, donors etc. If this was provided
as open linked data you could aggregate data from various NGOs in a
way that could make coordination a lot easier. Some vocabularies off
the top of my head: http://hyperdata.org/xmlns/project/ - for generic
project details, FOAF for organization details.

Also, check http://www.aidtransparency.net/ and see how it relates to NGOs.

Regards,

Peter Krantz
http://www.opengov.se