[open-development] barcamp & development data discovery session

Fri Aug 14 17:04:51 UTC 2009

Hi All, 

This is going to sound like a facetious question, but I really don¹t mean it
as one so bear with me.  But what do people mean by development data?  (data
how developed people are, on who is doing what for development, how do do
it, etc)

I think there are different uses perhaps going on in the conversation, and
it might be useful to spell out what those might be.  Each of those will
have different, if overlapping, sets of user cases etc.  T

his is just off the top of my head, but a couple of distinctions that strike
me might be:

1. data from or about low income countries/LDCs situations/outcomes e.g.
national census or Human Dev Index, health surveys data from LDCs but also
measurement of LDC performance across things like governance indicators
(World Bank CPIA, Polity IV etc), conflict stats, etc.  this is clearly a
very broad group 
2. data about development activities of developing countries themselves
(which is really their budgets, but also performance of their budgets/public
expenditure such as tracking surveys etc).  Presumable we aren¹t
particularly interested in the distinction between developmental and
non-developmental activities in this context (even if it could be usefully
made) and the defence and security activities of a recipient are just as
interesting.  
3. data about what other people are doing in LDCS (which is probably largely
aid, but there are some private flows etc.  International Aid Transparency
Initiative is looking at then first part at least, but aiming to structure
the data in a way that it can be related to 2.)
4. sectoral or specialist information (e.g. HIV, education etc) that
pertains only to LDCs (aka not US HIV treatment systems) which I think was
more what Joe was talking about perhaps?

Best
Karin

On 14/08/2009 17:37, "Simon Parish" <simon at devinit.org> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>  
> I have recently had a few discussions about possibly holding an open
> development (data) barcamp in the UK in autumn  building on success of open
> dev camp  in Washington DC last month (http://opendev.ning.com/)
>  
> We could also include a development data discovery session to identify more
> available development datasets for the ckan registry.
>  
> What do people think? It would be useful to get a sense of levels of interest,
> potential dates (early Oct/Nov?), possible venues etc.
>  
> Simon
> Simon Parrish | aidinfo @ Development Initiatives | * email: simon at devinit.org
> <mailto:simonp at devinit.org>  | : Web: http://www.aidinfo.org
> <http://www.aidinfo.org/>   | : Web: http://www.devinit.org
> <http://www.devinit.org/>   | : Web: http://www.commit4africa.org
> <http://www.commit4africa.org/>   | ( UK mobile: +44 (0) 7794 147 644| (
> Skype: simon.parrish73
> Independent research on aid, development policy, NGOs and government relations
>  
>  
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