World Bank’s Mapping for Results updates

Today at the Fall Annual Meetings the World Bank is hosting a special event to highlight “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions“. The goal is to create a dialog discussing how openness in data and knowledge can positively change the development practice. You can watch the live stream starting at 11:30am ET.

We worked with the World Bank starting about a year ago to launch Mapping for Results, a revolutionary initiative to geolocate and openly share every single location the World Bank was supporting activities. This past spring they launched with the 79 IDA countries including project activity locations and social indicators.

Today, they are releasing data for nearly their entire portfolio covering 136 countries, including the newest country of South Sudan where the World Bank has project activities but no reported financing yet. The data updates daily from the World Bank’s project API and is easily accessible through the download links on each page.

The World Bank are also leveraging the open-source Acetate maps to include terrain hillshading and placename labels to provide better context and meaning to the projects and activities in assessing their impact. See Kenya and Afghanistan.

What was particularly exciting about this release was that we were not involved at all in the development and updating of the newly released country data. Through the easy to use GeoIQ platform, the World Bank team was able to indepedently manage, visualize, and publish their own maps. Data and Mapping tools are made to be used by the domain and development experts, not by technologists and integrators just to share new data. The easier it is to share and create compelling and informative analysis the more timely and more effective that analysis will be.

There are a number of upcoming additions to Mapping for Results that we’ll be working with the World Bank team in adding some new capabilities. Now that the project has been gathering data they will be able to visualize changes over time in order to better share where development efforts are effective – and where they could be better. Enjoy the livestream and join the conversation.