Sir Tim Berners-Lee said:

“With Marco Civil, Brazil is on the brink of a remarkable achievement. Passing this legislation without further delay or amendment would be a historic step – not just for Brazil but for the world – in securing a Web which is free, open and truly serves humanity. It would cement Brazil’s reputation as a world leader on democracy and social progress and would throw down the gauntlet to other countries to frame online rights in a positive fashion. 

“This draft Bill preserves the Internet as it should be: an open and decentralized network, in which users are the engine for collaboration and innovation. Commendably, the Bill has among its foundations the guarantee of human rights, of citizenship and the preservation of the diversity and the social purpose of the web.” 

ENDS

Media enquiries to press [at] webfoundation.org.

‘Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries’ (ODDC) will assess how access to large-scale datasets can contribute to more accountable public spending, better urban governance and better sanitation and education, among other topics. The need for such research was discussed at the first Open Government Partnership plenary in Brazil last April, with 17 case studies selected for further study thereafter via a global competition. Researchers gathered in London this week to discuss their projects, plan their research and identify key topics to address across all the cases. The case study findings will be compared and synthesised, contributing to the development and testing of common methods and tools for designing and evaluating open data initiatives.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and inventor of the Web said:

“Open Data, accessed via a free and open Web, has the potential to create a better world. However, best practice in London or New York is not necessarily best practice in Lima or Nairobi.  The Web Foundation’s research will help to ensure that Open Data initiatives in the developing world will unlock real improvements in citizens’ day-to-day lives.”

José M. Alonso, program manager at the World Wide Web Foundation, added:

“Through this study, the Web Foundation hopes not only to contribute to global understanding of open data, but also to cultivate the ability of developing world researchers and development workers to understand and apply open data for themselves.”

Further details on the project, including case study outlines are available here: http://oddc.opendataresearch.org/

Although only a few years ago it was nearly impossible to find information and examples of Open Government Data initiatives and their components, there are currently a growing and varied number of Open Data resources all over the Web.

Given the increasing number of Open Data-related activities all around the world, and the social, economic or cultural diversity within the different countries, no single person or organization could grasp the whole scope of such a huge amount of information.

Any Government or organization interested in Open Data would greatly benefit from the existing and growing knowledge base and resources, so this scenario represents an invaluable opportunity to construct a neutral and trustable central directory that can help us to structure references, share best practices, and, generally speaking, mobilize the global Open Data community around it.

The Web Foundation has been built on this idea a definition of the functional and architectural requirements for the Open Data Directory platform (ODD) to support such a global directory of Open Data references and related information resources, that can range from scientific papers and studies to blog posts and to applications developed on top of Open Data.

The mission of the ODD would be to:

• Provide leadership in the domain

• Federate existing resources and act as a clearinghouse for them

• Facilitate replication of successful examples

• Help understand the challenges and benefits associated to Open Data

• Provide a best practice itself

For that, this reference directory will not initially compile a vast number of references but will give priority to high-quality references endorsed by the Open Data community. The directory will be open to everybody’s contributions, but a group of content curators will be in charge of updates, evaluating any proposed reference before its incorporation.

Although this approach may raise some disadvantages with regards to flexibility it will also lead to great benefits, mainly higher quality and better organisation in the compilation of resources. An intermediate approach where frequent contributors can also act as content curators is also possible.

The expected final result would be a curated directory of valuable organized references that are considered a must know for any Open Data stakeholder, including public administration, academia, civil society, private sector, non-governmental institutions, professional consultants, media and publishing industries or topic specialists among others.

The directory will serve as guidance on issues such as:

• Existing Open Data initiatives and reference institutions.

• General questions and doubts about Open Data.

• Technical questions on associated standards and technologies, such as formats, metadata, linked data, etc.

• Guidelines and best practices for data publication and reuse.

• Open Data policies and methodologies.

• Impact studies and thematic reports: Economic, Social, Legal, Accountability, etc.

• Implementation of Open Data in strategic areas such as: Health, Science, Transportation, Energy, Education, etc.

• Educational and dissemination materials.

• Examples of services, applications and products.

As a first step towards the ODD, we are making public today the Use Cases and Requirements Draft in order to get comments from the wide community on the content of the document itself but also on the overall idea of the ODD. We’ve published it as a Google Document with comments turned on. Suggestions, feedback and comments are very welcome.

The deadline for submitting comments is: April 19th, 2013.

Support is required in over 60 countries – from Argentina to Zimbabwe. If you believe you could play a valuable role, please visit the Global Integrity site by clicking here for full details and to apply.

Commenting, Sir Tim Berners-Lee said:

“The prize recognises what has been a roller-coaster ride of wonderful international collaboration. Bob and Vint’s work on building the internet was re-enforced by Louis’ work on datagrams and that enabled me to invent the Web. Marc’s determined and perceptive work built on these platforms a product which became widely deployed across nations and computing platforms. I am honoured to receive this accolade and humbled to share it with them. I want the Web to inspire and empower new generations of engineers—boys and, especially, girls—who will build, in turn, their own platforms, to improve our global society. I hope the message behind this award, along with the work we are doing with the World Wide Web Foundation and W3C, will assist in achieving the vision of a Web that is open, accessible and of value to all.”

Look out your window at the slum over the wall in New Delhi and imagine how you can change the way the world educates.

Armed with the world-changing practical philosophy of Internet pioneers before him that a computer can do anything you can imagine, Sugata Mitra is showing that if you pose a big question to children, give them access to the Web, they will self-organize and solve the problem. Mitra will now use the TED Prize money to build a School in the Cloud in India and disseminate SOLE toolkits for anyone in the world to initiate their own self-organized learning environments.

At a time when educators everywhere are struggling to modernize an education system that was developed by and for an outdated British empire, Sugata provides a bold starting point. The real significance of his work is probably less about solving the problem of access to education for the underprivileged than it is about re-imagining the whole concept of education in the digital age. In a Forbes interview, he says, “our current definition of education is to produce individuals who can fit into a bureaucratic machine. Education prepares to be one piece of a machine. … Everything falls into place and that is why everyone dresses the same way and why everyone is taught to know the same things. The result is a society that creates identical factory workers. The day of the factory is done. The West needs a fresh model.”

Can we create new learning formats based on co-creation and collective problem-solving — ones that are designed to help our youngest generation navigate the new Internet-connected economy and society in which information is limitless? Mitra’s work shows us that (even in the most unpromising settings and with a shoestring budget) education, like the Web itself, can be “a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.” Not only will kids teach themselves how to use the computers, but those who catch on the fastest will teach the others how to do it.

It is interesting how well all of this resonates with the ideas of the educator Paolo Freire, who inspired a generation with his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” to teach illiterate adults in the Brazilian favelas. Once dismissed as a dangerous revolutionary, Freire’s ideas are now coming to life on the Web through initiatives like Mitra’s.

Freire called traditional education the “banking model” because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. He said that instead we should treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.

Mitra has pushed Freire’s ideas even further, away from individual brains acquiring skills and towards collective creation of knowledge. He says, “we know that interconnected switches are the basis of thought. Every neuron is a switch. We know we think. But we already have billions of interconnected switches outside of the brain — that is the Internet. At the moment I believe 2 billion nodes. It’s easy to imagine 3 trillion in a decade’s time. Is it thinking? Is it the new learner?”

Mitra’s initiative for both the developing and developed world needs three things — 1) Broadband 2) Encouragement and Administration (by an army of supportive “online grannies”) and 3) Collaboration. Lack of broadband is an issue to be overcome in the developing world and certainly some areas of the developed world. Only 5 percent of the developing world has fixed line subscription broadband and only 8.5 percent have mobile access. In Africa alone, fixed line broadband is 0.2 percent and mobile broadband is 4 percent. And broadband, where it does exist, is expensive: UN Broadband Commission has found that in 19 of the world’s least developed economies — mostly in Africa — the cost of broadband is actually more than 100 percent of average monthly earnings.

The Alliance for Affordable Internet, an emerging global coalition coordinated by the Web Foundation, seeks to make this goal a reality by advocating reforms that will allow for healthy competition and innovation in the marketplace. This includes an end to luxury taxation on telecom goods and services required for Internet access, innovative uses of spectrum including “white space,” an end to monopolies in end user service provision, regulator independence and transparency, and greater infrastructure sharing.

There are many ways for naysayers to downplay Mitra’s vision of implementing Self Organized Learning Environments. Many around me here at TED that I talked to last night could think of several reasons why it wouldn’t work. “Could you imagine hiring a lawyer who was schooled in a Self Organized Learning Environment?” one said. Yes I can. We need a new education system that prepares our young people to succeed in a global, fast-changing world of tomorrow, not the world of yesterday.

We are pleased to announce the launch of ‘Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries‘ (ODDC), a two-year research programme co-ordinated by the World Wide Web Foundation and established with funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada).

In few short years open data has moved from being a niche interest in a few countries, to become part of the global policy mainstream, promoted widely by civil society, multilateral institutions, and by the Open Government Partnership. The ODDC project seeks to understand the dynamics of both open data policy and practice across the developing world, paying attention to the dynamics of open data use across different geographies and contexts, and looking at both positive impacts of open data, and unintended consequences. Through southern-led research cases, it seeks to develop a deeper understanding of developing country contexts and to determine the potential benefits and challenges of open data in such locations, supporting comparisons and contrasts to be drawn with early open data models from the US (data.gov) and the UK (data.gov.uk).

Armed with deeper insight and analysis of open data in a developing world context, ODDC project partners and stakeholders will be able to more efficiently engage global and local policymakers and practitioners to improve the developmental outcomes of open data initiatives in the developing world.

The Research Agenda

The core research objectives of this project aim to:

• Support critical evaluation of the claims made for the benefits of open data;

• Identify strategies through which open data can be employed as a tool of pro-poor and sustainable development;

• Identify unintended consequences of open data policies and practices, and highlight strategies to mitigate these;

• Identify the mechanisms through which open data can bring about change, and the factors that affect their successful operation, paying particular attention to the wider institutional, political and social systems in which open data use is embedded;

• Inform the significant investments of money and time being put into open data by national governments, funders, multilateral institutions and grassroots groups, and contribute to the efficient and effective targeting of resources, based on reasonable expectations about the potential returns from open data.

Studying Case Countries

ODDC will conduct 17 independent case studies in 14 countries, drawing diverse samples and contexts to explore the emerging impacts of open data in relation to particular governance issues – from budget monitoring or regulation of extractive industries, to management of city infrastructure or involvement of marginalised communities in decision-making. Each study will include a number of shared components, supporting a broad, comparative analysis of how open data is developing in various locations, and in relation to different substantive issues.

Initial case-study countries include Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Nepal, Paraguay, Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda and Uruguay.

Building the Open Data Research Network

To better realize the positive benefits of open data, much work is needed to fill the gaps in empirical evidence upon which open data initiatives are based. ODDC will continue to host researchers from the global south to explore open data in action, where it meets the processes of governance, and to provide a critical perspective on whether the promised outcomes do indeed occur and under what circumstances.

Learn more about the Open Data Research Network and join the Network’s LinkedIn group or follow the conversation at @odrnetwork

Developing a Common Assessment for Measuring Open Data

A key outcome of the ODDC project will be a robust, methodologically sound Common Assessment tool measuring the shared components of open data initiatives in the developing world. This Common Assessment tool will provide the analytical foundation upon which to build further assessment models and will greatly assist the field of open data research.

Visit www.opendataresearch.org to learn more about this exciting exploration into open data and for details on how to get involved.
Be sure to sign up for the quarterly newsletter to stay up to date on research developments and publications.

For this project, we conducted an in-depth analysis of mobile-enabled data-collection in Africa covering all aspects of the process: tools, actors, activities, business models, etc. The three reports are:

• Actors and Use Cases , outlining fundamental constituents of any data collection activity, while identifying the key actors, tasks, use cases and requirements that form part of it.
• Multi-Channel Data Collection for Social and Economic Development , revisiting the panorama of tools available, and exploring new trends relating to issues previously outlined in our research.
• Mobile Data Collection in Africa , summarizing the findings of this project. Drawing from the study that led to the previous two reports, as well as interviews conducted with major actors in the field, it presents the final conclusions of the project.

Nathaniel Padi recently walked into Mobile Web Ghana Lab and asked us if we could help him develop a mobile version of a software he had created with his friend. We are amazed about this young entrepreneur, so much that we decided to create this interview about him. Nat wants to sell his app in order to raise money to buy himself a laptop.

We are excited to announce our partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, the UN Millennium Campaign, and the Overseas Development Institute to put in place an innovative global survey, known as MY World, to drive global citizen participation in the post-2015 process telling us the changes that would make the most difference to their lives.

MY World is an options survey which, through creative online and offline methods, allows people across the world to tell the United Nations, and in particular the Secretary General’s High Level Panel, the most important issues they would like the post-2015 agenda to address.

It asks individuals which six of sixteen possible issues they think would make the most difference to their lives. The sixteen issues have been built up from the priorities expressed by poor people in existing research and polling exercises, and from the ongoing technical and political discussions about possible future goals. They cover the existing MDGs, plus issues of sustainability, security, governance and transparency.

The MY World survey can be accessed through THREE main channels:

• Online: at www.myworld2015.org in the six UN official languages and through social media;
• Mobile phone technologies (available from January 2013): via SMS and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) through toll-free phone numbers; and
• Offline (available from December 2012): in paper form by way of a ballot – distributed through a network of grass roots organizations, faith communities, youth groups, private sector bodies and NGO partners around the world.

More information and details on how to cast your vote can be found at www.myworld2015.org . Please be sure to share the word with your networks to ensure a truly global response.