Open Data, Open Development

Barbara Birungi | Hive Colab | September 27, 2012

Open Development, Open Data, most of us have a different interpretation to the words which is totally fine because it has many different faces, meaning to different people. Last week I attended the Open Knowledge Festival (OKFest) organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation in Helsinki Finland. MY interest and reason for attending was to find out as much as I could about open Data, Development as I could from people that had already started on the open journey in their countries and some even gotten their governments to sign on, How do you do that? Especially in Africa! Kenya for example has started on this OPENDATA.GO.KE, there are different organizations in the western world encouraging open data, development like SIDA, IATI,Openforchange,Plan,IDS among others

So what is open development, to me open development is inclusion of all stakeholders in development that promote access to the end product’s source materials? While open data is information that is readily available to be used, reused, distributed and accessed by anyone who wants it?