Let's Move Beyond Open Data to Open Development

The Sunday Business section of the New York Times prominently featured an image of a huge vault overflowing with bits and bytes. It was a story about the Bank’s Open Data initiative and claimed that datasets and information will ultimately become more valuable than Bank lending. It’s a powerful idea and one that sounds similar to the knowledge bank articulated by Jim Wolfensohn nearly ten years ago. But there is an important distinction between the two. This is not about the World Bank as the central repository of knowledge sharing its knowledge and wisdom with clients from the South. Instead, it’s about “democratizing development economics” in that it levels the playing field on knowledge creation and dissemination and opens the development paradigm to participation from researchers and practitioners, software developers and students, from north and south.

Fundamentally, it’s about culture change within a large expert-led institution. The author suggests that the World Bank’s relevance as a global institution is about leveraging information assets and an ability to connect suppliers and demanders of knowledge to one another. But it also underscores the importance of engaging with information users as well as clients and recognizes a shift to a more open and inclusive development paradigm co-created with clients.

Culture change is never easy and when information is currency and ultimately power, sharing it is filled with risk and uncertainty. For that reason, opening the Bank’s treasure trove of data more than a year ago had skeptics. Within months, however, traffic to the Bank’s data catalogue exceeded visitors to the homepage and many wondered why and how this data generated so much interest externally. One insight: while World Bank clients are just a handful of countries who take loans, World Bank users are hundreds of thousands of people who look to the institution for information, analysis, and sense-making of the “economic reality of billions of people and the decisions that have an impact on their lives”.