Open Data for an Open World
Today a game-changing move is happening in the development world. It’s easy to overlook the significance of the World Bank’s announcement that it’s opening access to all its global development and finance indicators including the Africa Development Indicators (for starters). Until today, many of these indicators were available by subscription only, accessible primarily as PDF files - difficult to search- available only in English, and could not be re-used to create secondary works (read mash-ups or Apps).
Data are the basic building blocks to understand basic questions of development and under-development. Without access to data that are reliable, comparable, and collected consistently over long periods of time, it is difficult to assess what is happening in a given context, let alone figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and where there are knowledge gaps.
When Hans Rosling gave his famous TED talk on Poverty in 2007, many were dazzled by what he did with data, particularly what he could visualize in ways that were easy to understand and question. He showed us that variations within countries (in areas like infant mortality, literacy, and GDP) were far greater than variations between countries. But he pointed out that most of the world’s development data were not available to the very people for whom they mattered most. They were locked up in databases in European and North American capitals and were not easily searched, found, and expensive to access; he coined the memorable acronym DBHD – database hugging disorder.
Today, the World Bank Group has joined with governments in the US, UK, Australia, India and several others in making Open Data a hallmark of doing business in the 21st Century. It will lead amongst multilateral institutions and demonstrate by example that liberating data can pave the way for others to create valuable products, tools, and mash-ups to understand trends, correlations, and development outcomes in new ways. Imagine a map that shows the relationship between infant mortality and aid flows at the country or district level or see mobile penetration in conflict zones. Relationships that were never before possible to analyze and visualize will empower citizens, CSOs, and the media to challenge policy makers, donors, and governments to confront the impact of their projects and the wisdom of their decisions.
We may overestimate results of this move in the near term but likely underestimate its impact over time. When software developers get hold of this data (particularly in poor countries), they will have access to the raw materials they need to create a variety of new applications and analytical tools to ask better questions, demand better answers and hold everyone involved to account. The world will be different as a result.
[Link - http://data.worldbank.org/]
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Comments
It's about time
This is exciting news and look forward to greater collaboration between engineers/developers, data miners, and the development community to help solve the problems that face our world.
Brilliant!
This is brilliant! Heard about the initiative from a friend in DEC today. Would be great to be able to facebook a link to the Open Data webpage and spread the word (virally). Will embed a URL for now.
thanks!
-tina
Share data page on Facebook
Tina - just to let you know that though we don't have a share feature on the main page, you can share to Facebook from the News page: http://data.worldbank.org/news or from any of the country or indicator pages, just hit the "SHARE" button middle-right of the screen.
- Neil (from Open Data Access team)
Share data.worldbank.org
Tina, just to let you know that you can share the site on Facebook via the news page (data.worldbank.org/news) or from any of the indicator, topic or country pages. Just hit the SHARE button middle-right of the screen. Hope it helps.
- Neil (Open Data Access team)
Opening our doors
What a great initiative this is, both in terms of substance (better and easier access to development indicators) and directionally, in terms of an additional step in the World Bank Group opening its doors to greater knowledge exchange, engagement, and collaboration around a global common good. It's a clear example of the direction we're headed with the new Access to Information Policy taking effect in July. It's also a great example of how widely used technologies can enable transparency and reach of information, two important contributions to development work. Getting the data and information into the hands of developing country constituents gives all stakeholders the power to contribute to the analyses of their specific contexts. Combine this with interactive features we have and are developing at the World Bank and we will be able to create a virtuous cycle of knowledge-sharing and learning. I hope this initiative will spark the development of some creative and innovative applications using the data, that can then feed back into the development community and contribute to our end goal of relieving poverty.
This is a great initiative
This is a great initiative bringing a lot of good will for the Bank. However, I hope that in the Bank "free data" doesn't become synonymous with "cheap data" of low quality. Users come to the Bank for quality data. Quality data requires resources and expertise and investment in developing standards and tools and maintaining partnership with a large network of data providers. Obviously, the loss of revenue from sales of this data would be a huge loss for small units like the Data Group to absorb. How all this will be sorted out remains to be seen but for now all of us associated with this line of work feel tremendously proud for getting the Bank to such a leadership position.
Free Data is not Cheap Data
Thanks for pointing out that core support is essential to ensuring that the Data Group continues to provide high quality, harmonized, and comparable data sets. Hans Rosling points out that "raw data" is not synonymous with useful data such as the world development indicators.
For quite some time, DEC at the World Bank has expended considerable resources to create data sets that are reliable, timely, and comparable. This is the public good DEC creates and should be supported as such. The analytics, visualization, and derivative products can be developed by others but the World Bank must be remain committed to providing all users the high quality foundational data upon which to build secondary tools and products.
Thanks for underscoring the importance of ensuring core support for this critical resource.
One step in the right direction
Congratulations Worldbank! We are looking forward to our national governments to follow!
There is of course much potential left untapped in the transparency policy. If I understand it correctly little information is available about the worldbank administration itself (salary levels of executives, overheads, expenses on consultancies, practices of subcontracting, etc.). I would also hope for the bank to extent its transparency policy to all institutions receiving project funds from the bank. Particularly in the fight against corruption and mismanagement detailed information (financial and otherwise) at the local level is necessary.
Sub-national ought to follow
I agree that by leading by example, we now wish to see national governments follow. Governments like India and Mexico already committed to RTI (Right to Information) are blazing the path in the developing world.
Where access to information gets really meaningful from the perspective of the citizen on the ground is when s/he can compare highly local data at the subnational level. Imagine being able to compare educational expenditures at the school level between one province and another, or literacy rates at the district level, or drop-outs between schools in a given province.
This data is necessarily local and often difficult to collect from national counterparts. But the end point from my perspective is getting this data into the hands of citizens and CSOs alike to empower them to ask better questions, demand better public services, and eventually push for improved development outcomes.
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