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The Egg Dance: From Peasant Village to Political Caricature

- March 29, 2018 in caricature, egg dance, Goethe, medieval customs, political egg dance

The egg dance was a traditional Easter game involving the laying down of eggs on the ground or floor and dancing among them whilst trying to break as few as possible.

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The Egg Dance: From Peasant Village to Political Caricature

- March 29, 2018 in caricature, egg dance, Goethe, medieval customs, political egg dance

The egg dance was a traditional Easter game involving the laying down of eggs on the ground or floor and dancing among them whilst trying to break as few as possible.

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The Egg Dance: From Peasant Village to Political Caricature

- March 29, 2018 in caricature, egg dance, Goethe, medieval customs, political egg dance

The egg dance was a traditional Easter game involving the laying down of eggs on the ground or floor and dancing among them whilst trying to break as few as possible.

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Open Data Day in Kenya and in Madagascar

- March 29, 2018 in Follow the Money, Open Data Day, open data day 2018

Co-authored by Prisca Rananjarison (Madagascar) and Chepkemoi Magdaline (Kenya) This blog is part of the event report series on International Open Data Day 2018. On Saturday 3 March, groups from around the world organised over 400 events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data. 45 events received additional support through the Open Knowledge International mini-grants scheme, funded by Hivos, SPARC, Mapbox, the Hewlett Foundation and the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The events in this blog were supported through the mini-grants scheme under the Follow the Money theme. Transparency International – Initiative Madagascar organized a conference at the the Resource Center for Contemporary Arts of Madagascar (CRAAM) in Antananarivo regarding open data concerning the public finances in Madagascar. EldoHub organized a hackathon which resulted in data-driven ideas with a hope of disrupting corruption by ensuring transparency and accountability in the use of public funds/resources in Kenya.  The two organizations have the same vision of using open data to support public oversight of governments and to help reduce corruption by enabling greater transparency.  Their objectives were to promote the use open data to contribute to public planning, feedback to public institutions on service quality innovation and economic purposes. EldoHub, located in the western region of Kenya, celebrated the open data day through a hackathon. It was held with a focus on County governments` transparency and accountability. The participants were technologists, university students, entrepreneurs and leaders from other institutions to who brainstormed and came up with lasting solutions for transparency and accountability in government institutions.

Celebration moods at Eldohub

In Madagascar, the event was held on March 6th at the resource center for contemporary arts of Madagascar (CRAAM). A hundred participants (representatives’ of the governments, the ministry, private sector, the civil society, students and regular citizens) attended the event.

at Resource Center  for Contemporary Arts, Madagascar

At EldoHub the main goal for the event was to come up with data driven tools to track county government’s use of finances provided by the national government or solutions that enable public to access information regarding the use of finances in the public offices and track development projects. The following groups presented their ideas to the judges:
  • WIKI FARM – A platform to use open data through SMS and USSD to guide farmers on good farming practices, and how to increase credit worthiness. They also seek to use open data to influence policies to make farming attractive to young people in Kenya and the entire Africa.
  • OKOA Mama – A platform to provide to the community regarding maternal health in Kenya`s public health institution, with the aim of providing solution to the ailing maternal health care system in Kenya. They also use SMS/USSD to reach pregnant women with information.
  • WAZI – A tool that can be used to track financial spending in the government. It can be used to track the budgets and development projects.
  • Exposed – Using data to expose corrupt dealings in the county governments more like whistle blowing.
  • E-transparency – Using open data to reduce favourism, nepotism and corruption in the tendering in the county governments in Kenya.

OKOA Mama presentation time

Judges keenly following thepresentations at Eldohub, Kenya

In Madagascar the event was graced by some speakers who gave keynote speeches on different topics that relate to Open Data Day. The speakers were Prisca Rananjarison (independent journalist and data-activist), Frederic Lesne (Transparency International Intiative Madagascar) and Florian Schatz (BIANCO- Independent anti-corruption office).

Madagascar Open Data Day speakers

First on the floor was Prisca Rananjarison who presented on open data, what it is and the criteria for data openness. She also discussed the problems of open data in Madagascar such as: the data are in pdf formats, most of the data remain in paper form and data are scattered and diluted in many sites. In Madagascar, there is no platform dedicated solely to open data in public finances. Citizens have minimal information on the public budgets. The opportunities available to them to participate in the budgeting process are very limited. Malagasy citizens do not know where the public money goes!  Added to this is the corruption that undermines the country. Second on the floor was Frederic Lesne, who talked about the results of the corruption Perception index (CPI).  Frederic highlighted the Transparency International initiative which intends to work on the promotion of a law on access to information which will allow the government to practice open data. However, he lamented on the government not putting in efforts to join the Open Governmental Partnership: despite it showing the intent to integrate it in 2016, until now nothing has been done. Florian Schatz presented BIANCO`s missions. This independent anti-corruption office aims to fight against corruption in Madagascar. The mission includes three components:
  1. Law enforcement
  2. Education
  3. Preventions
He showed that there is a strong correlation between open data and performance in the fight against corruption. The more open data is, the less corruption there is, as in the North for example.

Florian Schatz, BIANCO

General public airing their views in Madagascar at CRAAM

Next to the keynote sessions in Madagascar, the public were also given a chance to air their opinion on how to improve governance using open data in order to enhance transparency. This day was about introducing the assistance to the challenges of open data. Convinced that this is a wonderful tool against corruption, this conference is the first step of a lobbying aiming at creating a platform dedicated to public finances. But for this to happen, a law on access to information is required. The next action for the Transparency International Initiative Madagascar is to make a multiparty convention that will soon be signed for the promotion of open data in Madagascar. In Kenya the event was all about brainstorming on ideas that can enhance the citizens’ access data and use the data for the benefit of the country. OKOA Mama Group emerged on position one. They were followed by E-transparency as first runner-up and WikiFarm as the second runner-up. They were followed by WAZI and Exposed respectively.

Recommendations and Conclusion

Funding

We recommend the release of funds before the date of the event rather than after the event. This will make it easy for planning and avoid last minute rush. Due to high turnout than the expected, we incurred extra expenses but we are glad that we were still able to make the event more successful despite the shortcomings.

Incubation

From the event, amazing ideas were presented, we feel they should be mentored and incubated. We therefore request that extra funding be provided so that they can be incubated to fruition at EldoHub incubation center. This will ensure all the ideas come to life.

Turn Out

The two events were well attended.

Events in Non- Capital Cities

We also recommend more such events and forums outside the capital cities be supported. This is because a lot of focus has been on the city. In Kenya most hubs are in Nairobi: if other hubs outside the capital city like EldoHub are supported it will lead to more inclusion. For more photos of the Open Data Day, Eldoret, Kenya, click here.  

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Open Data Day 2018: getting the local communities in Porto and Helsinki to talk about open mapping

- March 28, 2018 in Open Data Day, open data day 2018, Open Mapping

This blog is part of the event report series on International Open Data Day 2018. On Saturday 3 March, groups from around the world organised over 400 events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data. 45 events received additional support through the Open Knowledge International mini-grants scheme, funded by Hivos, SPARC, Mapbox, the Hewlett Foundation and the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The events in this blog were supported through the mini-grants scheme under the Open Mapping theme: the blog has been jointly written by Transparência Hackday Portugal / Open Knowledge Portugal  and Open Knowledge Finland . Open Data Day 2018 was devoted to open mapping in both Porto and Helsinki. Both Open Knowledge branches involved in the organization of the event invited the local communities to talk about OpenStreetMap (OSM): how to use the data and how to contribute to the project. OpenStreetMap is not a single map or service, but a large set of data that doesn’t belong to a specific person or entity, but rather the community. This means that anyone can use OSM to create apps and reuse its data in other interesting ways — for example, this is what Mapbox has done, the company has developed a set of services on top of OSM to create a business model. There are a couple of good local examples as well: Sapo Mapas in Portugal, and Digitransit, the official public transport journey planner in Finland. Both cities witness that there is currently a lot of interest in the field of open mapping. One of the best things about Open Data Day 2018 was to bring together actors from different contexts. In Porto, we were very happy to see the interaction between the different layers of actors in the open data field. We had Ana Santos and Francisco Caldeira from the National Statistics Institute (INE), with expertise in geographic census data; João Pina, the author of Fogos.pt, a website mapping fires in Portugal, using public datasets by an official entity; Miguel Tavares, from Águeda City Hall, an institution using and contributing to OpenStreetMap, and also building tools with geographic data; and people from the OSM Portugal community, such as Jorge Gustavo Rocha. The author of fogos.pt wanted to shift away from Google Maps, and the contact with OSM-PT members opened the avenue for collaboration and to turn Fogos.pt into a resource fully based on open data sources. INE showed their plans to open up their 3-million-point address database among others, firing up participants willing to test and try it out. In Helsinki, the 3rd of March was a workshop day that culminated the series of three-day celebrations: an introductory case study day (with Helsinki Region Infoshare) and an Open Knowledge Finland (OKFI) working groups and strategy day (with Responsive.org and OpenGLAM). All three days were co-organised by OKFI at its offices at the Maria 0-1 startup incubator. On Saturday, there was brunch, an open democracy coding workshop as well as three mapathon workshops: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT-OSM), Mapillary, and OSM locally. The day’s focus was on hands-on production of open data to be published in OSM by creating and complementing maps. The first mapathon of the day was organised by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which is perhaps the fastest-growing community of open data contributors in Finland at the moment. This time, their workshop had about 20 participants, most of them newcomers, who contributed 1555 buildings and 113 kilometres of roads and paths. Results: http://ernoma.github.io/mapathon/ODD2018/ During the second workshop, 10 people learned and took 873 street-level photos (of which 140 were 360⁰) with the Mapillary smartphone app to cover the historical Maria’s Hospital grounds surrounding the venue. Results: a map with the photos and the area at Mapillary’s website The focus of the last mapathon of the day was fixing map errors in your neighbourhood in a service that you use daily based on OpenStreetMap. This provides yet another type of prominent entry into the world of open knowledge and OpenStreetMap in Finland. The more people learn and contribute in workshops like this one or otherwise, the more complete, up-to-date and flawless the paths, addresses and points of interest become in all the services that use OpenStreetMap.

Lessons learned from the community and plans for the coming months

In Portugal, the participants were eager to learn more about OSM — how to contribute to the project and how to use the resources it makes available. It seems that there are not enough opportunities to get people together to discuss, learn and work together. Open Data Day, and our monthly Date With Data meetings, are a crucial space to get these people together — there are no similar forums in Porto (or Portugal!). We had rainy weather on Saturday otherwise we would have made a walk around the city to learn about mapping, on the field. Learning how to contribute to OSM, either by submitting data or reviewing data will definitively be the motto for one of our monthly sessions, in the next months. We also want to take some time to talk about mapping technologies for showing and visualizing open data. In Finland, we enjoyed the new collaboration between Open Knowledge Finland and the mapping communities in Finland: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Finland community as well as OSM Finland community. Our concept for the day — combining different modes of activity and themes — seemed to boost the diversity of people, e.g. in terms of age or background (students, company staff etc.). For example, the HOT-OSM events are usually promoted to students or other activists, but this time there was wider range in promotion and participation with joint efforts and networks of promotion. When it comes to other synergies, the participating communities were happy that OKFI had organised the space, the food and the budget. We are planning other joint events such as 24-hour mapathon later this year.

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Open Budgets Index: A survey by OK Greece on open budgets of public sector bodies in Greece

- March 28, 2018 in Greece, OK Greece, open budget survey, Open Data Index, OpenBudgets

Within the scope of openbudgets.eu, a project funded by the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation programme, Open Knowledge Greece (OK Greece) conducted a survey on the availability of open public budgeting data in Greece. Then, our team created an interactive map that allows users to check the scores of their municipality or regional administrative unit. You can visit openbudgets.gr to check out the map.

Open Budgets Index: Greek Municipalities General Index (March 2018)

The Open Budget Index was inspired by Open Budget Survey and the Open Data Index. They both underline the importance of open public data for the promotion of transparency and building public trust. Open budgets in particular, if used properly, have a strong potential in the creation of participatory budget mechanisms.

Open Budgets Index survey step-by-step

This survey takes a look at what happens at the local level by examining municipalities and regional units in Greece, a country that struggles with the application of open data law, even though it’s been four years since the adoption of legislation.

Open Budgets Index: Greek Municipalities License scores (March 2018)

In order to measure the existence as well as the quality of the available budgeting data, a number of criteria was set, such as data resources (based on accessibility), license, data format and the existence of budget monitoring tools.

Survey key findings

Based on the survey results, 300 out of the 325 municipalities in Greece do publish some form of budgeting data on one of the official state resources: the document sharing platform Diavgeia, data.gov.gr (the official public data repository) or the municipality official website.

Open Budgets Index: Greek Municipalities Resource Formats scores (March 2018)

However, the available documents and data vary immensely in format, level of detail and consistency. The majority of the available budgets (81%) are PDF documents. 9 out of 325 municipalities make good use of the official public data repository data.gov.gr, while just 17 offer budget monitoring tools of some kind. In addition, 96% of the available budgeting documents are published under undefined license. The results for the regional administrative units are similar. All 13 institutions publish budgeting documents but only two units offer machine-readable content and one out of 13 sources is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Open Budgets Index: Regional Units General Index (March 2018)

By conducting the Open Budgets Index Survey, apart from providing Greek citizens with detailed information about the state of open budgeting data in their regions, we also suggest a step-by-step method for open data research. Our approach is based on yes/no questions and basic indicators, such as resource, level of detail and data format, that are easily understandable within the national context. Looking closely at the survey results, we draw the conclusion that administrative units in Greece are willing to open up their data but there is still lack of understanding of what open data is and how it can benefit not only the citizens but also the administration itself. Thus, this survey is designed in such a way, that allows administrative units to easily read their open budgets profile and recognise the exact steps they need to make in order to open their budgeting data and improve their index score. Taking this project one step further, we suggest that the solution lies within adopting common prototypes and formats, collectively. Data homogenization might reduce the existing open data costs and allow applications like openbudgets.eu to work effectively for the public benefit.
 This survey was conducted as part of Open Knowledge Greece’s commitments within the context of the Third Greek Open Government Partnership Action Plan 2016 – 2018;  Commitment 30: Open Data Index for cities and local administrations and Commitment 31: Linked, Open and Participatory Budgets.  

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5 Lessons We Learned From Open Belgium 2018

- March 28, 2018 in Open Belgium

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5 Lessons We Learned From Open Belgium 2018

- March 28, 2018 in Open Belgium

On March 12th, the World Wide Web’s 29th birthday, 250 Open Knowledge and Open Data enthusiasts gathered in Louvain-la-Neuve, ready to enable access for everyone to a web worth having.
The whole day was designed to get an update on local, national and global open initiatives as well as to share skills, expertise and ideas with like minded open data peers. Header What was new at Open Belgium 2018 This year’s Open Belgium Conference hosted 51 speakers from government, industry, academia and community that shared their knowledge in 35 Sessions. The presentations covered everything around Open Knowledge and Open Data, from the economic value to sustainability, privacy issues, technical challenges and solutions.
  • Open Belgium has worked hard to make the conference affordable for everyone. Ticket prices were reduced by half from 2017. This year Solidarity Tickets were introduced; with purchase of this category ticket, one enables two less fortunate data enthusiasts to attend Open Belgium 2018.
  • For the first time in Open Belgium history, the whole event was live-streamed and followed by 450 people online on that day.
  • Instead of previous editions’ written transcripts of the sessions, this year you can find videos of all sessions on the Open Knowledge Belgium Youtube channel.
  • This year next to the main track in English, a side track in French for Wallonian public authorities was organized.
Who attended Open Belgium 2018? Attendees

While it’s difficult to choose amongst the wide variety of topics I would like to share with you

My 5 personal highlights:

 

The web is under threat, and only we can save it!

The event traditionally kicked off with the overview of the State of Open Knowledge in Belgium. Delivered by Toon Vanagt, the chairman of Open Knowledge Belgium and Benoit Hucq, Director General of Digital Wallonia, the speech this year was oriented around transforming Belgium via greater Awareness, Empowerment, and Governance.
While highlighting the advances in Belgium since last year, the presentation didn’t forget to shed light on the controversy around the new GDPR regulations, and caution against taking it as an excuse for locking up data, and keeping it accessible by only a few.
Find all Presentation Slides and Videos here

Other keynote speakers:
Heleen Vollers –
Watch ‘Best Open Data Practices across Europe‘
Maarten Lambrechts –
Watch ‘12 Reasons why your data is not fully open‘   LOD

Linked Open Data Lessons

Diving right into the day with a multitude of Linked Open Data talks. Eight talks presented the role of linked and interoperable data within different domains, amongst those cultural heritage resources, touristic data, film archives up to the digitalisation of public administrations. The obstacles related to interoperability are shared amongst all sectors and I would like share following lessons by Agis Papantoniou to overcome them.

   

Making Data:

  • reusable – publish raw data and not HTML or PDFs
  • comprehensive and interoperable – Add metdata
  • findable – use intuitive links to optimize data browsing
  • accessible – store data in stable locations and encoded in URIs
  • reusable use open licenses like CC 4.0
  • use LOD Quality Assurance Frameworks

How to unlock your data’s full potential

  Kasper Van LombeekIn a session on Open Business Models, Kasper Van Lombeek, Founder of Rockestate shared how the start-up calculated various properties for all houses in Belgium (e.g. the building type, roof inclination, number of rooms). They use the Open Lidar data-set and apply latest artificial intelligence techniques to combine their open geo data* with their customer’s data to build predictive 3D models that can radically change business and industry. Presentation here *Open Geo Data is every publicly available piece of information with a spatial dimension. Other speakers in the Open for Business Session:
– Philippe Duchesne – Open Data Annotations
– Sebaastian Ter Bur, Hessel Van Oorschot, Jolan Soens, Winnie Poncelet, Gwen Franck – Open For Business
  

Don’t publish data without reuse

At 2:30 pm Frank Verschoor and Jochem Van de Berg from The Green Land successfully beat the inclining afternoon slump with their interactive session explaining how to effectively use open data in practice. At the example of their project ‘Flevoland (NL) Smarter’, they showed the impact of active listening and preferencing needs over assumptions on data utility. To conclude, Open Data are only valuable when they meet needs, so don’t publish data without reuse!  

The Future of data is Frictionless

Vitor Baptista, Engineering Lead at Open Knowledge International hosted the “Using Frictionless Data software to turn data into insight” hackathon. OKI’s Frictionless Data Initiative is about making it effortless to transport quality data among different tools and platforms for further analysis.
Unfortunately, not all attendees had brought their own laptop, but those that did were introduced to the software that streamlines data workflow process, and learned how to add metadata and to validate datasets. Be part of a vibrant open source, open data community Frictionless
oSoc18

What’s next…?

For you who still don’t have enough of Open Knowledge and Open Data, check out the 8th edition of Open Summer of Code 2018. The 4-week summer programme in July provides Belgian based students the training, network, and support necessary to transform open innovation projects into powerful real-world services.  

See you at Open Belgium 2019!

Thanks for reading my personal highlights, it was really tough to choose between all the fantastic presentations! Find all presentations here. Videos will follow soon, and for more Open Belgium pictures see Wikimedia.

Lastly, a big thank you to the partners that made Open Belgium 2018 possible!   Partner Logos

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The Diverting History of John Gilpin: Shewing how he Went Further than he Intended, and Came Safe Home Again (1782)

- March 27, 2018 in ballad, chapbooks, horse, horse riding, John Gilpin, london, William Cowper, woodcuts

A 1906 edition of William Cowper's famous ballad, illustrated with brilliantly comic woodcuts from Robert Seaver.

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The Diverting History of John Gilpin: Shewing how he Went Further than he Intended, and Came Safe Home Again (1782)

- March 27, 2018 in ballad, chapbooks, horse, horse riding, John Gilpin, london, William Cowper, woodcuts

A 1906 edition of William Cowper's famous ballad, illustrated with brilliantly comic woodcuts from Robert Seaver.

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