[open-government] Web Foundation Announces New Project to Assess Potential of Creating Open Government Data Initiatives in Chile, Ghana and Turkey

[Craig Heintzman]

FYI - Steve Bratt, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation (founded in 2009 
by Tim Berners-Lee) just announced moving forward with a project to 
assess the potential of creating open government data initiatives in 
Chile, Ghana, and Turkey -- the first step of what we hope to be a 
global initiative focusing on low- and middle-income countries. Link and 
text copied below.
Craig

-------------------------
http://www.webfoundation.org/2010/08/potential-of-open-government-data-in-chile-ghana-and-turkey/

Within less than a year, the United Kingdom <http://data.gov.uk/> and 
United States <http://data.gov/> have put hundreds of thousands of rich 
datasets on the Web in machine readable formats. Thousands of 
applications have been built --- the vast majority without taxpayers' 
money --- by civic hackers to analyze, mash-up, and map these data. 
Potential benefits of an Open Government Data (OGD) practice include new 
services, new insights, increased citizen participation, new businesses 
and better governance. Though other countries, provinces and cities are 
exploring OGD, there has been little activity in low and middle income 
countries (see map at left). Given the potential benefits and reasonable 
costs, it is importance to assess how relevant an OGD initiative might 
be in these countries as well.

The World Wide Web Foundation <http://www.webfoundation.org/>, with the 
our partner Fundacion (CTIC) <http://www.fundacionctic.org/>, is taking 
the first steps in this direction.   We are starting a new project to 
conduct an assessment of the feasibility and potential of an OGD program 
in three diverse countries 
<http://www.webfoundation.org/projects/ogd/> --- Chile, Ghana and 
Turkey.  The bottom line questions are:  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?

The project originated in response to a call for proposals from the 
Transparency and Accountability Initiative:  a donor collaborative that 
includes the Ford Foundation <http://www.fordfoundation.org/>, Hivos 
<http://www.hivos.nl/>, theInternational Budget Partnership 
<http://www.internationalbudget.org/>, the Omidyar Network 
<http://www.omidyar.com/>, the Open Society Institute 
<http://www.soros.org/>, the Revenue Watch Institute 
<http://www.revenuewatch.org/>, and the William and Flora Hewlett 
Foundation <http://www.hewlett.org/>. The funding for this project 
originates from the Omidyar Network <http://www.omidyar.com/> and 
the Open Society Institute <http://www.soros.org/>.  The project runs in 
parallel to a similar feasibility study focusing on India, also support 
by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and run by the Centre 
for Internet and Society <http://www.cis-india.org/>.

Our work is starting with the development a new methodology for 
assessing OGD readiness, based on our experience and an excellent paper 
commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and 
written by Becky Hogge 
<http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/focus/communication/articles_publications/publications/open-data-study-20100519> from 
earlier this year. We will then conduct research through visits to each 
country, Web studies, and phone and email interviews to complete the 
assessment by the end of October. As Tim Berners-Lee said in his 
interview with Becky, "It has to start at the top, it has to start in 
the middle and it has to start at the bottom." In other words, we must 
talk with people from the highest levels of government, the public 
administration officials who collect and care for data, and the people 
who will leverage the data to create new applications. And we will do so 
during this study. The results should be available before the end of 
this year.

The Web Foundation is committed to supporting efforts around OGD in 
individual countries, and as a emerging movement around the world. This 
is evidenced by the work of Web Foundation Directors Tim Berners-Lee and 
Nigel Shadbolt in the UK and US, the W3C Brazil Office in their country, 
and W3C's eGovernment Interest Group, as well as work to built capacity 
in the Caribbean 
<http://www.webfoundation.org/2010/07/open-data-in-the-caribbean/>. If 
you want to learn more, please contact me 
<mailto:steve at webfoundation.org> or Stephane Boyera 
<mailto:boyera at webfoundation.org>.

*About World Wide Web Foundation*

World Wide Web Foundation <http://www.webfoundation.org/> leads 
transformative programs to advance the Web as a medium that empowers 
people to bring about positive change. Created under a seed grant from 
the John S and James L Knight Foundation 
<http://www.knightfoundation.org/>, the Web Foundation brings together 
business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, 
experts, developers and end users to tackle challenges that, like the 
Web, are global in scale. By funding education, outreach, research and 
the next generation of Web technologies, Web Foundation strives to 
enable all people to share knowledge, access services, conduct commerce, 
participate in good governance and communicate in creative ways. Web 
Foundation is a registered tax exempt, public charity in Switzerland and 
the United States.



-- 
Craig Heintzman
World Wide Web Foundation
M: +1.857.756.8008
O: +1.617.391.0251
W: webfoundation.org

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