Open Data in Development

When I was in college I took a course in aerial photography interpretation.  Other than learning how to perform image analysis, something also stuck with me.  Barry Haack the professor briefly talked about his research, on of the ideas was if you can give people information about where things are you can help them economically.  I was reminded of this at the Aid Innovation Challenge 2010 at the World Bank.

The idea of the Challenge was how can bring transparency to aid help make it more effective.  The event began with a keynote from Clay Johnson.  One of the points he made was “open doesn’t mean naked,” the idea being that you can open your data in a positive manner that does not bring ridicule to your organization’s data.  This also lead to discussion later in the day regarding public versus open data.  Sometimes there is much data available but it is in a format so difficult to use that most people avoid the data. Tom Grubisich wrote a post on “‘Open’ Vs. ‘Public’ Data — The Big Difference.”

Datasets such as PLAID which is information on development finance will be available publicly shortly.  You can be sure we’ll be uploading that data, visualizing it and blogging about it as they become available.

While at the challenge I did a short interview about open data, which you can view below.