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Collaboration and Open Knowledge

Duncan Edwards - April 15, 2014 in Uncategorized

The following guest post is by Duncan Edwards from the Institute of Development Studies. 

I have a few reflections and thoughts to add to those raised in a thoughtful post by Tim Davies in response to the new branding and core purpose statement announced by the Open Knowledge Foundation last Friday (11 April 2014). Similarly to Tim, I have the utmost respect for the great work OKF and the OKF community have done over the years and would concur with the 5 points Tim makes in his preliminary notes.

As Tim points out the new purpose statement seems to read with a really strong focus on data and technology which doesn’t appear to represent the diversity and views held by those in the OKF Community.

I have been part of the organising committee for the Open Development streams for OKfestival 2012, OKCon 2013, and am currently part of the group curating sessions for OKFestival 2014. Scanning through proposals for this July’s festival it is evident is that in many cases the sessions are focussed on areas way beyond open data and technology so to see such a narrow focus given in the new core purpose statement is a little surprising.

What’s in a name?

I can understand to a certain degree the logic behind changing the name of the Open Knowledge Foundation – they’re not a foundation. I think what’s perhaps more problematic is simply changing it to “Open Knowledge”. The OKF as an organisation is a legal entity. Open Knowledge is a movement (one that OKF has had a very central role in building and mobilising) that many of us feel a part of. Surely it’s problematic to confuse the two?

Why is data a starting point?

Data is created by society. Data is shaped and in some ways is representative of parts of that society. How does society shape data, information, and knowledge? Focussing purely on data as a starting point seems to me to be missing a big chunk of the picture.

Importance of collaboration

We have heard much over the last few months about data revolutions particularly with data being positioned as an important pillar in a UN post-2015 framework. I wrote some reflections from the discussions in the Open Development sessions at OKCon in September 2013 and Rufus Pollock mused in (http://blog.okfn.org/2012/09/13/managing-expectations-ii-open-data-technology-and-government-2-0/) – I think these hold true. Recognising that data is likely to have a really important and foundational role in social development to address inequality – this potential will only be realised through new forms of co-ordination and the collaborations of many different actors to utilise and apply data and technology within social change processes.

These collaborations will likely involve individuals and organisations who have been working at the sharp end in social change processes for many years and many come with a certain degree of tech-scepticism in the knowledge and experience that many social problems are hugely complex and don’t have technical fixes – coming across as being so tech-centric undermines the considerable work members of the OKF community, who appreciate the value of the data and tech aspects, who are building bridges with or are members of these other communities.

So yes, I’d agree with the sentiment that the Open Knowledge movement needs to bring more people into the conversation – but dumbing down messaging really isn’t the way to do that. These people want to know that an Open Knowledge community has a more grounded and realistic understanding of the world and is not simply “open data is good, open data and tech will fix the world”.

Is it worth considering how some of the thinking, which explicitly recognises the necessary connections between knowledge, technology, and society, that has gone into the OKFestival might be useful here? I would love to see more in depth exploration of this as way to provide the hooks into the open knowledge movement – in my view this would provide much more appealing handles for engagement beyond the data and technology worlds.

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Open Development & Open Data – Challenges and Opportunities

Katelyn Rogers - December 10, 2013 in Uncategorized

Guest Post by Thomas Salmon originally posted on his blog

Global Development Professionals Network in London ICT4D Meetup:
‘Open Data in Development’ and ‘Open Development’ has sort of come of age. Global financial institutions, recipients of aid like Kenya, donors like DFID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation see potential in the arrival of open data to the development world, as posts by Chris Gingerich and Saara Romu indicate
The World Bank has recently announced a formal partnership with the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Data Institute in London to work together over the next three years. In addition to this, another World Bank initiative called the Open Development Technology Alliance (ODTA) already has 7 draft reports out on the subject.
Organisations such as Publish What You Fund and Ushahidi have been doing it all since 2008. The Open Knowledge Foundation (2004) also has supported these efforts and many others, acting as the broad umbrella that brings open data people together, coordinating working groups on ‘Open Development’ as well as one onOpen Sustainability with blogs, and resources like this simplevideo fromOpen For Change. It describes how opening up different forms of content, using licenses and standards can generate new forms of collaboration to achieve different goals in development work. Open for Change was also behind the Open Development Camp 2013 which recently took place in Amsterdam.
Harnessing open data to be used for development work may bring significant benefits. Overseas aid and humanitarian work could be made effective by using data to challenge many of the assumptions that are often wrongly made about developing countries and disaster situations. Data can be opened up for different groups to use in different ways to help tackle corruption and may even encourage policy making to be based on harder evidence. High expectations for those involved in the delivery of aid to be transparent and accountable are most likely to increase, not diminish. For example, this might have implications for a body such as the Global Fund that is being accused in the British press of having watered down its own reporting and auditing proceedures.
 
Even broader questions though were posed at this camp in November, to be considered. How can open data, innovative technology and new ways of working help us create a better world? How relevant is open data when you live on less than $1 a day? How can we avoid yet another divide between the haves and the have nots in this shift? What are the security risks?
NGO’s and foundations working in development are also not the only ones getting involved. The UN has also been working on opening up its practices and its data. The UNDP for example has recently launched its new open data platform and work is continuing on other projects such as the Common Humanitarian Exchange Language which is coordinated by the humanitarian agencies.
Recently at a meetup on the 26th of November, a group of 58 people at the Mozilla offices in London met to dig into Open Data for Development. If you missed it and would have liked to have come, there will be more events in the future and the OKFN will hold a big conference in Berlin in July. The event was organised by the London ICT4D meetup group and by Eliza Anyangwe who runs the Guardian Global Development Professionals Network. This is a summary of the discussion, along with some observations. Please do add feedback to this post here in the comments section below, and any comments that you wish to add are very welcome.
Eliza Anyangwe brought along an engaging panel, consisting of Ulrich Atz (Open Data Institute),Heather Leson (OKFNlabs) andClaire Provost (Guardian Global Development) who were asked to address two questions:
– What are the hopes and aspirations for open data / open development
– What are the challenges and obstacles ahead?

 

Photo by Daniel Fowler

A good contingent of ICT4D researchers also attended along with doctoral researcher Tony Roberts, spiritual sherpa and founder of the ICT4D London meetup group with a squad of researchers from Royal Holloway. The academic community were well represented with Duncan Edwards from IDS (who has written on this topic here), Vanessa Thomas from the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre in Lancaster, Gregory Grisha Asmolov from the LSE and Geraud De Ville from the Open University. It was also great to have representatives from many organisations and NGO’s including Aptivate, One World, the IRC, Africa Gathering, CIFOR, Publish What you Fund, and of course the OKFN.

 

Eliza Anyangwe has written a recent piece for the Guardian on this topic, and kicked off the proceedings with a provocation looking back at Florence Nightingale’s use of data visualisation techniques in her own campaign for changes in health treatment in the British army. Not only did her complex and innovative graphs present rich data, they were also constructed to prove a point. Her analysis and representation of the causes of death and disease bordered on advertising for her cause. With data visualisation now having become so ubiquitous in journalism and in the media, are we getting to a point where we are simply losing the ability to distinguish between information and misinformation? If open development work proceeds in a similar way, what happens if the data quality is not addressed adequately? What are the things getting lost in the glare of data visualisation?
Heather Leson from the OKFN stressed the importance of having the right kinds of feedback loops both in terms of feelings and methods. Feelings count because they indicate how to build trust in the sources, or whether people understand the data. People often don’t trust the data unless they are involved in the data collection. Until we talk more about how we involve citizens, then we won’t know how to get the right feedback, the remixing and re-use of data that helps to get a more accurate ‘open data picture’.

 

In terms of methods, she pointed out that standards for interoperability are important, referring to a clean Dataset Guidelines list. She pointed out how important it was in an election project with Ushaidi to have communities involved in cleaning data in real time. Examples were also given of data cleaning projects using machines to do this.
Finally, Heather focused on the need to teach and build data literacy. The School of Data has held experimental training workshops for early adopters already. We now need to think more about the question of how to cross the gap between these initial efforts and reaching the next 1000 datamakers in civil society and government.

 

Ulrich Atz, the head of statistics at the ODI provided some further concise reflections. He pointed out that it is not just about making data ‘beautiful’ but that ‘openness’ involved addressing specific technological, financial and legal hurdles. He made the point that bad data also stifles innovation, leading to problems for sustainability of the whole enterprise. The lack of standards creates inefficiencies that create barriers to data re-use. He pointed out that we need to think about more than just transparency, and consider the role of data within the whole ecosystem. Before it becomes fit for purpose, it is important to test the quality, reliability and validity of data.

 

He focused on the power of standards and on the ODI’s work on creating certificates for open data. This is a kind of badge that links to a description of your open data. The description explores things like how often it’s updated, what format it’s in, who and where it came from. For more information see the ODI’s work on this here.

 

He also made a call to action for us to collect success stories and to remind people to keep holding governments to account for the pledges that they have made to make their data open. He pointed out that a lot of attention had focused on the potential social value of open data, but relatively little had focused on the environmental or economic benefits and possibilities.

 

Claire Provost who works for the Guardian on global development issues made several points from the perspective of someone at the sharp end of using open data for journalism in the public domain. Timely data can come at the cost of better quality data, and there is often an easy conflation between data journalism and visualisation. Learning to apply the same journalistic scrutiny to datasets as other sources is crucial, and tools that assist in making the process of evaluation of datasets dynamic (such as the aid transparency tracker) are very useful. This tool gives you the ability to understand the plans from various organisations on publishing data, the data fields across all their plans, and gives an analysis of their commitments to publish aid information. Another potentially useful tool mentioned in discussion was also the P2P search engine Yacy. As Clair put it, for the investigator it helps first to know exactly what you don’t know.
From her perspective as a journalist it seemed that high stakes questions about the right to information still often are where to start digging. There are many situations in which a well placed request for information, the process of demanding the right to certain data for a story is often the most effective way of fact checking and getting the story right. At least you’d assume the process itself reveals a lot about who is and who is not being given access to data.

 

The group discussion that followed touched on many points, with journalists, activists, and data scientists approaching the same questions from different perspectives. But here are some of the major points: .

 

1. Negatives:
We do need to look at negatives as well as positives, and look at situations where open data is not working well. Rufus Pollock at OKFNlabs has recently posted on the topic of Bad Data here.

 

2. Ethics:
We need to consider ethics as well and realise that in different fields ‘open data’ practitioners can be led into high stakes conflicts, such as on land title issues. An interesting perspective on ethics, informed participation and informed risk-taking is also been posted on the OKFNlabs blog here.

 

3. Experiment:
We should encourage people to try and experiment and see what happens. Mark Brough pointed to work he had just done on tracking aid to the Philippines here and to the potential for quick, agile and effective action by data wranglers of all kinds in helping with these post-disaster coordination projects in a short time span.

 

The Center for Global Development goes into more detail about how open data initiatives such as this and FAITH, the Philippine government’s own Foreign Aid Transparency Hub launched 10 days after the crisis have played important roles already in helping to improve coordination and effectiveness.

 

4. Local Knowledge is important:
We should bring data to local partners to critique and use in different ways, to allow them to make sense of it from their perspective. This point seemed to be about looking for more participatory and inclusive approaches to development using open data. It is a gap which early on was picked up by the UNDP. In this area the UNDP has pointed out the importance of creating channels for people’s voice within institutions in order to make them more responsive to the poor.

 

5. Think about goals:
Do we need to return to thinking about the goals of development rather than always talking about the means and the tools? If we are thinking about opening up development for the future, then for what and for who? Should we still be calling it development at all? Is using a framework and language of development helpful in terms of dealing with the problems of climate change, migration and systemic risk today? Or should we be attempting to subvert or re-cast those terms?

 

6. Don’t be a bubble:
Open data for development claims to be a potential force for good, but if it remains both mainstream and expert driven it may not evolve to close the widening gap between the highest levels and people who are the most disempowered and decision making at a local level. In terms of dialogue, we are still a little bubble. People find exciting ways to circumvent that insularity continuously, but unfortunately it is part of the DNA of open development that it lives in the hands of technical experts. Over time concerns such as building linguistic localisation, creating clear documentation, using simple language and searching for criticism and making openness a cultural watchword for how we operate, may need to be addressed more fully. The point was made that the open data movement is still relatively new and has only just emerged to find itself in the mainstream but from another perspective this problem is not at all new. A dependence on technical expertise, closed language and forms of knowledge has always featured heavily within technical communities and development communities alike.
Quick wins for open development in summary:
– use local partners: they know their contexts best
– integrate with media sources to build on existing more popular media
– train each other to analyse data
– fill gaps in terms of standards and semantics
– call out institutions that do not make data interoperable
– remind governments of their commitments
– publish metadata and the methodology of what gets published
– share examples of what open data can change
– share failure and be open about what is not working
– be realistic about what the small community can solve. This movement is still fairly new
– allow people to tinker with data

 

Further comments

 

Jay Naidoo, Chair of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Partnership Council of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) made a clear call in his keynote at OKCON in 2013 for open development to bring politics to the table, for a ‘revolution of morality’. He urged us to think about the ethics, to think about how we mobilise citizens as whistleblowers and journalists, to think about ways to also bring about the progressive realisation of human rights through how we are using technology.
After the panel I decided to reflect on this call to action and to the idea of bringing politics in. How would you create tools to build a more caring and humane society that focuses more on the vulnerable? Where should politics be more involved in open development?

 

Political discussions about goals, mobilisation and even ethics are often separated from the discussions about standards, practices and ‘lessons learned’. Since the High Level Panel’s report on the Post-2015 agenda coined the phrase, the call for a ‘data revolution’ has been moderately anodyne. Open data work seems more focused on tools, distilling expertise in the manipulation, statistical calculation and collection of data than on the kinds of stories we are seeking to tell and to whom.

 

But I’d like to look at three reasons why it seems to me people should do more thinking about linking these seperate discussions together, at least in open development. I’d like to draw out some of these questions for people to wrangle with in the open community.

 

The first reason is that open data is not really seperate from existing reforms to public service delivery and governance. It could just be seen as the logical extension of other political reforms to decentralise government and decision making. Both the left and the right have their different ideas about this and tend to see different types of opportunities in decentralisation, and so also in ‘openness’. For the left it is an opportunity to open channels for giving voice and bringing processes closer to the people, while for the right it appeals because it opens up accountability measures and short-cuts, providing opportunities for improved efficiency and cost savings. It can sit politically within a ‘third way’ approach. But either way, it will need to fit in clearly with the designs of politics in any given context.

 

The second reason is that it is implicitly a challenge to the status quo from the ‘outside’. A dynamic of innovation seems to be building on these new insider / outsider relationships. Decision making is concentrated in the hands of those that hold power, experience and wisdom. The proof of which is in their embodiment of assets such as knowledge and networks, implicitly shaping discourse. The mainstream if you like is geared powerfully towards sustaining and protecting all that it has created, and less towards change and the new. In contrast the relatively fragile, emergent and innovative solutions adopted by outsiders and different actors are partly designed to disrupt this. There are always ‘early adopters’ of change, and a necessary and sufficient point of convergence for change. To be clear if the ‘data revolution’ is about a change process and innovation, handing power over in order to bring about change, then within this process there will always be different pathways and circles driving it.

 

But the point here was to be critical. Providing critiques of open data initiatives is a necessary and essential part of stirring the pot in a process of evaluation and reflection. Bringing attention to the fact that there are different understandings and versions of ‘open data’ out there is healthy and opens pathways to improve what people do. This debate between Rob Kitchin and David Eaves is one example.

 

It is worth mentioning the wonderful opportunity to learn from others, particularly by reflecting on what stands at the heart of being ‘open’ for different communities and where that leads to. One definition proposed by Mitchell Baker, Executive Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, to me highlights the potential for innovation and problem solving.
She suggests that by building things in a way that they are inherently interoperable, we have the opportunity to try new things and so we can do more. By documenting and making things knowable and transparent, we can see them and understand them, so we can know more. When we do more and know more, she suggests there are many other things we can do better. The hope might be for development that this will foster and build accountability and trustworthiness, and individual choice and empowerment. Openness is a mission that the open movement is passionate about and is very good at. The good news is that there is real expertise to build on and learn from everywhere within this movement. The work of Open Matt on openness at Mozilla for example, is a shining demonstration of this.

 

Thirdly, this seems to me to be political because the future of development work itself is at something of a turning point. Development work in the future is likely to be different, possibly requiring different kinds of political agreements between new and old donors, emerging middle income and lower income countries. At the same time that we are discussing new priorities for development, some donor countries such as Australia and Canada are locking down their bilateral aid agencies, while others are heralding the end of the golden age of NGO’s, or limiting their funding for example in Kenya. Many governments seem to be keen to ‘leave room’ for wider and leaner action by the private sector or initiatives driven by corporate social responsibility.

 

The point here is to highlight the danger of simply debating the tools and the means, without getting clear about where we are going and how. Planning for the future is also a process of working backwards from a vision. But there are some quite different versions of that vision out there at this current time.

 

Nancy Birdsall for one, sees this as a simple and straightforward leap towards the end of aid and development altogether by 2030. However, her ideas detailed in her blog post ‘2030 ODA No More‘ stand in contrast to those placing greater importance on tackling inequality (see the Guardian’s debate on this or the IPS). Other perspectives such as that of Amartya Sen from the capability perspective, are aiming for a more human centered and rights based model for development. To be clear, there are likely to be at least as many different understandings of ‘open development’ as there are of ‘openness’ and ‘development’ alone.

 

Finally, calling something ‘open’ doesn’t just make it so. Development is a discourse that has a history spanning over many years. It is a world in which global institutions largely have been able to impose policy and change from above. The servicing of debt to global lenders with structural adjustment policies throughout the 90’s for example was imposed on countries in the process of fostering ‘modern institutions, democracy and economic growth’ in the process of ‘development’. It also led to the imposition of many destructive policies. The simple fact of encouraging participation of different voices and ideas now does not simply lead to all voices counting equally. Participation and openness are not the same thing either. As Tiago Peixoto points out in his piece on experiments with participatory budgeting, participation is always unequal. We should consider inclusiveness in our approach to ‘openness’, promoting the participation of previously marginalized sectors of society. The amplification of networked and distributed decision making alone does not undo the fact that power is overly concentrated in the hands of a few. It may simply mean that those who control such networks have a mechanism through which to speak for the multitude across a new architecture of interconnected nodes with greater complexity and power. Or as Ruth Carlitz suggests, is participation really being encouraged or is it simply a framework for ‘being participated with’. Surely our standards for ‘openness’ have to take into account in the end whether the dynamic suggests real participation or not? And to what extent might this dynamic be reflected within global transparency initiatives? For example while governments in many countries have been encouraged to become more ‘open’ about their budgets and their aid giving, the global lenders at the IMF score comparatively poorly on ‘openness’ and are not yet IATI signatories. Without bringing attention to some of the political issues, efforts to widen decentralised governance and accountability through ‘openness’ will not take into account the political questions highlighted in the points above. That is to say, how such a process gains traction from both the left and the right in any context within political institutions, how it implicitly articulates itself as a challenge to the status quo, and finally how it conceives of goals and leads towards a vision for the future in order to confront problems such as widening inequality, financial risk and unmitigated climate change. ‘Participation’ in short is not enough, it simply renders this ‘openness’ in the weakest sense. Tiago Peixoto has also pointed out that transparency projects are also often the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of open governance, and are tempting for governments to focus on. His work has questioned the simplicity with which notions of participation and participatory experiments have been thought to lead directly to more effective collective action. Without a definition of ‘openness’ in development that also considers political barriers explicitly, that also encompasses barriers to collective action, there is a real sense that this ‘openness’ serves partly to isolate and close off aspects of this area of decision making from view. What remains outside of our own definitions of ‘open development’ should concern us, or we may end up refashioning development for its own purposes more than for anyone else’s.

 

 

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The revolution will NOT be in Open Data

Katelyn Rogers - November 19, 2013 in Uncategorized

The following guest post is by Duncan Edwards from the Institute of Development Studies.

I’ve had a lingering feeling of unease that things were not quite right in the world of open development and ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development), so at September’s Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva I took advantage of the presence of some of the world’s top practitioners in these two areas to explore the question: How does “openness” really effect change within development?

Inspiration for the session came from a number of conversations I’ve had over the last few years. My co-conspirator/co-organiser of the OKCon side event “Reality check: Ethics and Risk in Open Development,” Linda Raftree, had also been feeling uncomfortable with the framing of many open development projects, assumptions being made about how “openness + ICTs = development outcomes,” and a concern that risks and privacy were not being adequately considered. We had been wondering whether the claims made by Open Development enthusiasts were substantiated by any demonstrable impact. For some reason, as soon as you introduce the words “open data” and “ICT,” good practice in development gets thrown out the window in the excitement to reach “the solution”.

A common narrative in many “open” development projects goes along the lines of “provide access to data/information –> some magic occurs –> we see positive change.” In essence, because of the newness of this field, we only know what we THINK happens, we don’t know what REALLY happens because there is a paucity of documentation and evidence.

It’s problematic that we often use the terms data, information, and knowledge interchangeably, because:

Data is NOT knowledge.
Data is NOT information.
Information is NOT knowledge.
Knowledge IS what you know. It’s the result of information you’ve consumed, your education, your culture, beliefs, religion, experience – it’s intertwined with the society within which you live.

Understanding and thinking through how we get from the “openness” of data, to how this affects how and what people think, and consequently how they MIGHT act, is critical in whether “open” actually has any additional impact.

At Wednesday’s session, panellist Matthew Smith from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) talked about the commonalities across various open initiatives. Matthew argued that a larger Theory of Change (ToC) around how ‘open’ leads to change on a number of levels could allow practitioners to draw out common points. The basic theory we see in open initiatives is “put information out, get a feedback loop going, see change happen.” But open development can be sliced in many ways, and we tend to work in silos when talking about openness. We have open educational resources, open data, open government, open science, etc. We apply ideas and theories of openness in a number of domains but we are not learning across these domains.

We explored the theories of change underpinning two active programmes that incorporate a certain amount of “openness” in their logic. Simon Colmer from the Knowledge Services department at the Institute of Development Studies outlined his department’s theory of change of how research evidence can help support decision-making in development policy-making and practice. Erik Nijland from HIVOS presented elements of the theory of change that underpins the Making All Voices Count programme, which looks to increase the links between citizens and governments to improve public services and deepen democracy. Both of these ToCs assume that because data/information is accessible, people will use it within their decision-making processes.

They also both assume that intermediaries play a critical role in analysis, translation, interpretation, and contextualisation of data and information to ensure that decision makers (whether citizens, policy actors, or development practitioners) are able to make use of it. Although access is theoretically open, in practice even mediated access is not equal – so how might this play out in respect to marginalised communities and individuals?

What neither ToC really does is unpack who these intermediaries are. What are their politics? What are their drivers for mediating data and information? What is the effect of this? A common assumption is that intermediaries are somehow neutral and unbiased – does this assumption really hold true?

What many open data initiatives do not consider is what happens after people are able to access and internalise open data and information. How do people act once they know something? As Vanessa Herringshaw from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative said in the “Raising the Bar for ambition and quality in OGP” session, “We know what transparency should look like but things are a lot less clear on the accountability end of things”.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. Do citizens have the agency to take action? Who holds power? What kind of action is appropriate or desirable? Who is listening? And if they are listening, do they care?

Linda finished up the panel by raising some questions around the assumptions that people make decisions based on information rather than on emotion, and that there is a homogeneous “public” or “community” that is waiting for data/information upon which to base their opinions and actions.

So as a final thought, here’s my (perhaps clumsy) 2013 update on Gil Scott Heron’s 1970 song “The Revolution will not be televised”:

“The revolution will NOT be in Open data,
It will NOT be in hackathons, data dives, and mobile apps,
It will NOT be broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube,
It will NOT be live-streamed, podcast, and available on catch-up
The revolution will not be televised”

Heron’s point, which holds true today, was that “the revolution” or change, starts in the head. We need to think carefully about how we get far beyond access to data.

Look out for a second post coming soon on Theories of Change in Open, and a third post on ethics and risk in open data and open development. And if you’re interested in joining the conversation, why not sign up to our Open Development mailing list

Image source: http://epicgraphic.com/data-cake/ Data cake metaphor developed by Mark Johnstone

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Ethics and risk in open development

Katelyn Rogers - November 19, 2013 in Uncategorized

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The following guest post is by Linda Raftree. Linda works with Plan International USA, serves as a special advisor on ICTs and M&E for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Evaluation Office and is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Development Working Group.

A core theme that the Open Development track covered at September’s Open Knowledge Conference was Ethics and Risk in Open Development. There were more questions than answers in the discussions, summarized below, and the Open Development working group plans to further examine these issues over the coming year.

Informed consent and opting in or out

Ethics around ‘opt in’ and ‘opt out’ when working with people in communities with fewer resources, lower connectivity, and/or less of an understanding about privacy and data are tricky. Yet project implementers have a responsibility to work to the best of their ability to ensure that participants understand what will happen with their data in general, and what might happen if it is shared openly.

There are some concerns around how these decisions are currently being made and by whom. Can an NGO make the decision to share or open data from/about program participants? Is it OK for an NGO to share ‘beneficiary’ data with the private sector in return for funding to help make a program ‘sustainable’? What liabilities might donors or program implementers face in the future as these issues develop?

Issues related to private vs. public good need further discussion, and there is no one right answer because concepts and definitions of ‘private’ and ‘public’ data change according to context and geography.

Informed participation, informed risk-taking

The ‘do no harm’ principle is applicable in emergency and conflict situations, but is it realistic to apply it to activism? There is concern that organizations implementing programs that rely on newer ICTs and open data are not ensuring that activists have enough information to make an informed choice about their involvement. At the same time, assuming that activists don’t know enough to decide for themselves can come across as paternalistic.

As one participant at OKCon commented, “human rights and accountability work are about changing power relations. Those threatened by power shifts are likely to respond with violence and intimidation. If you are trying to avoid all harm, you will probably not have any impact.” There is also the concept of transformative change: “things get worse before they get better. How do you include that in your prediction of what risks may be involved? There also may be a perception gap in terms of what different people consider harm to be. Whose opinion counts and are we listening? Are the right people involved in the conversations about this?”

A key point is that whomever assumes the risk needs to be involved in assessing that potential risk and deciding what the actions should be — but people also need to be fully informed. With new tools coming into play all the time, can people be truly ‘informed’ and are outsiders who come in with new technologies doing a good enough job of facilitating discussions about possible implications and risk with those who will face the consequences? Are community members and activists themselves included in risk analysis, assumption testing, threat modeling and risk mitigation work? Is there a way to predict the likelihood of harm? For example, can we determine whether releasing ‘x’ data will likely lead to ‘y’ harm happening? How can participants, practitioners and program designers get better at identifying and mitigating risks?

When things get scary…

Even when risk analysis is conducted, it is impossible to predict or foresee every possible way that a program can go wrong during implementation. Then the question becomes what to do when you are in the middle of something that is putting people at risk or leading to extremely negative unintended consequences. Who can you call for help? What do you do when there is no mitigation possible and you need to pull the plug on an effort? Who decides that you’ve reached that point? This is not an issue that exclusively affects programs that use open data, but open data may create new risks with which practitioners, participants and activists have less experience, thus the need to examine it more closely.

Participants felt that there is not enough honest discussion on this aspect. There is a pop culture of ‘admitting failure’ but admitting harm is different because there is a higher sense of liability and distress. “When I’m really scared shitless about what is happening in a project, what do I do?” asked one participant at the OK Con discussion sessions. “When I realize that opening data up has generated a huge potential risk to people who are already vulnerable, where do I go for help?” We tend to share our “cute” failures, not our really dismal ones.

Academia has done some work around research ethics, informed consent, human subject research and use of Internal Review Boards (IRBs). What aspects of this can or should be applied to mobile data gathering, crowdsourcing, open data work and the like? What about when citizens are their own source of information and they voluntarily share data without a clear understanding of what happens to the data, or what the possible implications are?

Do we need to think about updating and modernizing the concept of IRBs? A major issue is that many people who are conducting these kinds of data collection and sharing activities using new ICTs are unaware of research ethics and IRBs and don’t consider what they are doing to be ‘research’. How can we broaden this discussion and engage those who may not be aware of the need to integrate informed consent, risk analysis and privacy awareness into their approaches?

The elephant in the room

Despite our good intentions to do better planning and risk management, one big problem is donors, according to some of the OK Con participants.  Do donors require enough risk assessment and mitigation planning in their program proposal designs? Do they allow organizations enough time to develop a well-thought-out and participatory Theory of Change along with a rigorous risk assessment together with program participants? Are funding recipients required to report back on risks and how they played out? As one person put it, “talk about failure is currently more like a ‘cult of failure’ and there is no real learning from it. Systematically we have to report up the chain on money and results and all the good things happening. and no one up at the top really wants to know about the bad things. The most interesting learning doesn’t get back to the donors or permeate across practitioners. We never talk about all the work-arounds and backdoor negotiations that make development work happen. This is a serious systemic issue.”

Greater transparency can actually be a deterrent to talking about some of these complexities, because “the last thing donors want is more complexity as it raises difficult questions.”

Reporting upwards into government representatives in Parliament or Congress leads to continued aversion to any failures or ‘bad news’. Though funding recipients are urged to be innovative, they still need to hit numeric targets so that the international aid budget can be defended in government spaces. Thus, the message is mixed: “Make sure you are learning and recognizing failure, but please don’t put anything too serious in the final report.” There is awareness that rigid program planning doesn’t work and that we need to be adaptive, yet we are asked to “put it all into a log frame and make sure the government aid person can defend it to their superiors.”

Where to from here?

It was suggested that monitoring and evaluation (M&E) could be used as a tool for examining some of these issues, but M&E needs to be seen as a learning component, not only an accountability one. M&E needs to feed into the choices people are making along the way and linking it in well during program design may be one way to include a more adaptive and iterative approach. M&E should force practitioners to ask themselves the right questions as they design programs and as they assess them throughout implementation. Theory of Change might help, and an ethics-based approach could be introduced as well to raise these questions about risk and privacy and ensure that they are addressed from the start of an initiative.

Practitioners have also expressed the need for additional resources to help them predict and manage possible risk: case studies, a safe space for sharing concerns during implementation, people who can help when things go pear-shaped, a menu of methodologies, a set of principles or questions to ask during program design, or even an ICT4D Implementation Hotline or a forum for questions and discussion.

These ethical issues around privacy and risk are not exclusive to Open Development. Similar issues were raised last week at the Open Government Partnership Summit sessions on whistle blowing, privacy, and safeguarding civic space, especially in light of the Snowden case. They were also raised at last year’s Technology Salon on Participatory Mapping.

A number of groups are looking more deeply into this area, including the Capture the Ocean Project, The Engine Room, IDRC’s research network, The Open Technology Institute, Privacy International, GSMA, those working on “Big Data,” those in the Internet of Things space, and others.

I’m looking forward to further discussion with the Open Development working group on all of this in the coming months, and will also be putting a little time into mapping out existing initiatives and identifying gaps when it comes to these cross-cutting ethics, power, privacy and risk issues in open development and other ICT-enabled data-heavy initiatives.

Please do share information, projects, research, opinion pieces and more if you have them!

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Guest post: exploring open development

Tim Davies - April 16, 2013 in Uncategorized

Geletaw Zeleke, activist and writer concentrating on social justice, political freedom and development issues, has contributed the below guest post t to the open development blog. If you would like to write a guest post for open-development, you are welcome to share your ideas on the group mailing list.

Exploring open development

Since human desire is so complex the road to address this need is of course complex as well. Considering its broad nature we might say that development is just such a journey toward improving human life. When states or organizations take on the responsibility of improving people’s lives one of their core values and a principle of development activities expected to be “openness”. It seems there is a hidden consensus that openness in development is considered as a core value. The necessity of transparency, especially in community development activities, is not strongly debated. The question is, however, what is the practical phase of open development? How does it manifest in the activities of a state or organization? Then, what does being open mean? These questions lead us to an exploration of the real openness of one’s state or organization.  There are four elements that help us to examine the idea of open development (OD). These elements are reliability, access, participation and integrity. Let us take a look at these elements in turn. 

Reliability

The idea of openness, however, is not only concerned with access to information for stake holders although this is an important. It is concerned with the reliability of data. The reliability of data shows the degree of openness of the state or organization. Reliability of data, especially in developing countries, is an important factor for any development progress. The word openness goes beyond just displaying information. It goes to the extent of providing plausible information about development projects.

The motive of people to see openness in societal development emanates from certainty. It is usually the result of excitement about the development project or the excitement to experience innovative ideas. People want to know about the development project in order to understand it and develop a sense of belongingness through it.

As we have mentioned reliability is important to the developmental process. The idea of reliability can be seen from two perspectives. One is statistical ability. The organization’s tools highly determine the quality of the data and its ability to extract truth from each activity. Stakeholders or partners and others will get plausible information if the data is of quality. If the tools of the organization are weak then this will distort the Open Development principle. The second perspective to view reliability is plausibility itself. In some less developed countries developmental reports will lack plausibility. In order to receive funds from donors such as the IMF or the World Bank and other bilateral agencies success is exaggerated. In some cases the information even confuses people. We see the same issues presenting with extremely different data. This huge difference comes not from development being abstract to measure but it seems in most cases it is the result of a lack of reliability.

Access

The second element or practical manifestation of Open Development (OD) is that of access. Access in this context is not only providing reliable data but also giving detailed further information when prompted. The development program will be most successful when it truly opens its door to giving and receive information. Openness to receive feedback and such ideas for innovation is one of the elements of OD.

Participation

The third OD element is that of opening a door to participation. In state and developmental organizations development programs have to be open to community participation throughout the planning and implementation process. If the participation of stakeholders or a community is only partly cooperative then that organization can be labeled as lacking transparency. The amount of participation can determine the success of an organization.

Integrity

No state or organization is perfect. Being open to accepting criticism and opinions from the public is one of the measurements of how open an organization is. Some organizations are closed to accepting criticisms. They even tire out their resources with defense. Criticisms should be seen as opportunities for a state or organization to generate innovative ideas.

As we have seen the four elements of open development can have a measureable impact on the smooth operation of community development projects.

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Exploring Open Development in the Open Book

Tim Davies - March 30, 2013 in okfest2012

Following last years Open Knowledge Festival the Finnish Institute have just published ‘The Open Book’, a compendium of articles on aspects of open knowledge. The book includes an article on Open Development, created by our working group and drawing upon contributions from the open-development community.

Read on for the full article, or check out the rest of the Open Book here (we’re under ‘I’ in the A-Z index for International Collaboration).

Exploring open development

“Open access”, “open knowledge”, “open data”: these are phrases that are becoming more common in the world of international development cooperation. But do they add up to something we can call ‘open development’? Or is open development something more?

This article draws upon an informal survey carried out through online discussions before, and interviews at, the 2012 Open Knowledge Festival, asking a range of people to respond to the question “What does open development mean to you?”.

Defining development

“For me, open development means thinking about the word ‘development’ differently. It means that development happens everywhere, all the time, in many different ways, and that we are ALL complicit in the ongoing unfolding of development.” Katherine Reilly, Assistant Professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University

International development is itself a contested concept, with a long history of ‘new ideas’ promising to transform the development process. For many people, international development essentially means aid, flowing from rich Northern countries to poorer Southern nations. Yet, although aid remains an important part of the development landscape, with over $130bn a year spent by OECD countries, the idea of development as just a North to South transfer of resources is one of those outdated views of the world that Hans Rosling’s gap-minder visualisations work hard to dispell.

The Wikipedia article on International Development explains that it is concerned with “greater quality of life for humans” and “therefore encompasses foreign aid, governance, healthcare, education, poverty reduction, gender equality, disaster preparedness, infrastructure, economics, human rights, environment and issues associated with these”. Working with this broad understanding of development, we can see that the individuals and organisations involved in development don’t just come from ‘development agencies’, and the challenges of development are significant, requiring wide ranging action and collaboration. Even without a universal definition of what international development is, we can still explore the potential of openness applied to this broad development field, identifying learning from open knowledge for development, and learning from development for the open knowledge field.

Open technologies: tools and templates

At first glance open development might seem to be about the application of open technologies and open data to the development field. After all, some of the high profile initiatives in the field, such as the Internation Aid Transparency Initiative which brings together open data on aid funding, and the World Bank’s Open Data Portal, have put a lot of energy into creating open data portals and open technology platforms. However, the consensus is that open development is about more than just technology. In 2005, Bellanet, a project of the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), set out their open development work as “an integrated package” involving “open standards, open source and open content…that not only provides opportunities for operating in an open manner, but also promotes the ideals of common ownership and collaborative development for the collective benefit of all”. Michael Roberts, Acclar.org  (Bellanet – 2005 ‘Open Development’ work programme).

However, this does not mean that open development downplays the importance of open source or open data. The examples of collaboration and sharing seen in open source and open knowledge movements have provided the inspiration for many open development ideas.  And in many cases open technologies and open information can play a foundational role in the development process: neccesary but not sufficient conditions: “to have open development you need information, you need open data – but open data does not equal open development.” Craig Fagan, Senior Policy Coordinator at Transparency International

For many advocates of open development, open technologies are not just cheaper or more flexble tools, but are an enabler of new ways of working. Importantly, for work in a world where technology is not evenly distributed, these new ways of working may be accessible even when the technology is not. As Linda Raftree of Plan International explains: “development workers and organizations can learn from horizontal and networked structures, and from other attitudes and practices in the ‘open’ movement…structures inherent in the web and networked information sharing can be taken ‘offline,’ and seen as models for helping ‘development’ become less top-down and more horizontal – open to a wide range of local actors.” The desire for less top-down, more bottom up, and peer-to-peer processes in development did not emerge with the Net, or open ideas. Work on participatory development has a long track record, and those working in the area of open development can learn from philosophies like that of Paolo Freire, Robert Chambers and others who have a history of working in participatory ways. Open development can bring new insights, and new energy, to the journey, and integrate new tools and ideas along the way.

Ian Thorpe, UN aid worker, knowledge manager and blogger put’s it like this: “Openness in development is more of a journey than a destination: new technologies and shifts in power structures will I hope make development more and more open – but there will probably never be a time when we can say that it is totally open and that there is no more work to be done.”

Open information and knowledge

“Open development is removing the restrictions to accessing vital information in society” Francis Fuller Bbosa, Statistician , Development Research and Training, Uganda

Access to information and knowledge was as key theme in our survey of views on open development. There are two sides to this: information and knowledge about development, and information and knowledge for development.

Anna Härri an intern at Pro Ethical Trade Finland explained that “to me, open development is about informing the masses openly about the efforts of the development community to eradicate world poverty, and thus increasing donations and support for development aid.” This sort of openness involves not only data on where money is spent, but also information on the results of development programmes. Ruth del Campo, Director of Open Aid Register, explains that this can be challenging, requiring donors and others in the development community to be honest when showing the whole picture. For Ruth, being open with development information involves also “being able to show all development projects and admit that development projects can fail, even when that is not the desired outcome” . Combining an openness about the limitations of particular projects, with open information on who is doing what, can support collaboration across boundaries. Ruth goes on to say that with open development we should  “[be] able to see who is working in a specific zone, no matter which organization [they] belong to”. Balancing the demands and organisational incentives of openness to build support for development, openness for accountabilty, and openness for learning and collaboration may not always be easy, but, as Philip Thigo of Social Development Network (SODNET) tweeted “Open development is not speaking truth to power, but making power truthful & truth powerful! Now that’s a thought #okfest #opendev”.

When it comes to open knowledge not just about development, but for development then some put the case strongly: “personally, for me, open knowledge means no obstacles, no restrictions, no limitations, no copyright”, Francis Fuller Bbosa, Development Research and Training, Uganda. So much knowledge that could be used for development is only accessible if you’ve got a University computer account that gets you the right journals, or if you can afford license fees. Whilst the growth of open access publishing, and open data and open access policies from institutions like the World Bank are starting to shift the default in publishing from closed to open, there is still a long way to go in making sure all the knowledge that could support development is available. Janet Maranga of Ufahamu emphasises this point: “open development for me is knowledge and all the other facets that contribute to knowledge made open, not-restricted, so they become able to be shared and be used by everyone.”  Truly open access to research may involve more than just the price or license of an article, but might also require attention to be paid to how the use of technical languages and formats that can limit who gains real effective access to knowledge.

In the pursuit of open knowledge for development, many practitioners emphasise that, whilst we may be seeking universal access to information, we need to be aware that there are many ways to access knowledge, and multiple knowledges that need to be included and transmitted in the open world.  Janet Gunter, consultant, blogger, activist, states that “open development means different things to different people, and the stakes are very different. Getting access to information in provincial Africa is vastly different than in the global north where we might be talking about IATI and aid data sets. Information is more than data, it emerges from social process; relevant and useful information often comes as metaphor and story.” This is a point picked up by Ewen Le Borgne, knowledge sharing and communication specialist at the International Livestock Research Institute in Ethiopia, outlining that open knowledge needs to “…be about inviting the multiple knowledges concerned by micro or macro development initiatives to be aware of and have their say.” Knowledge is not something static, captured once and for all in a document or website, but is constantly being constructed, shared, reshaped and transmitted in many ways – through audio, video and writing – and through statistics and through stories. Openness of knowledge should not just be about openly sharing information created by those with resources and power, but should be about constantly working to open up the processes of knowledge creation too.

Participation, freedom and co-creation

“I think open development is not just a process of getting information to people, but opening information for engaging in decisions, having discussions, debates. So it is about participation.” Craig Fagan, Senior Policy Coordinator, Transparency International

Craig’s comments were echoed by many taking part in the open development stream at the Open Knowledge Festival. Tony Roberts, Co-Founder and Director of Web-Gathering states that “for me open development is opening development to other voices that are not normally heard”, and Ineke Buskens of the GRACE Project articulates in a vision in which “open development is about people co-creating according to their own design, the spaces, ways and means that will evolve humanity into experiencing more life, liberty and happiness through the connecting power of ICT”. These visions combine a focus on both individual and collective empowerment. Peter Ballantyne, also of the knowledge management team at the International Livestock Research Institute in Ethiopia calls for ‘open’ to be the “default individual and institutional setting for ‘sharing’ and ‘engagement’. “

Few underestimate the culture change this involves, and, as has already been noted, ideas of participatory development have been long discussed, and rarely fully delivered. Yet, in breaking down organisational boundaries through open access, open information, open data and open technologies – and by adding a genuine committment to culture change – open development can be more than the sum of it’s parts. Tony Roberts again: “open development means enabling the intended ‘beneficiaries’ of development (rather than technocrats) to be the authors, architects and artisans of any development activity”.

The focus on sharing, collaboration and co-creation at the heart of open development highlights the specific forms of freedom that open development is in pursuit of. The openness of open development is distinct from the openness of open markets. As Matthew Smith of IDRC puts it, with reference the ideas of Yochai Benkler, “to me open development means harnessing the power of sharing and cooperation over hoarding and competition to create a better future”. An open space supportive of development is not one free of rules, structures and support, but is one in which the rules, structures and support that exist are oriented to enable and amplify co-operation, collaboration and sharing, tapping into the capacity of humans for selfless action for particular and common good.

Conclusions

An articulation of open development raises challenges both for the International Development community and the Open Knowledge community. For actors in International Development, it calls for a greater committment to openness, collaboration and sharing. This is not only about exploiting the power of open technologies to do the same work more efficiently, but  is about embracing openness as one part of shifting the balance of power towards the marginalised, ensuring that development activities are the result of co-creation, not impositions from outside. And for Open Knowledge activists and architects, a recognition of global inequality calls for attention to be paid to who is empowered by open source, open data or open hardware, and to take the extra steps to ensure it is not just the educated and financially secure few who can make the most of the opportunities openness brings, but that the ability to contribute to, and benefit from the entire realm of open knowledge is there for the majority. Realising open development requires vigilance that the openness movement stays true to this underlying intent of openness, keeping the promise and values of openness in line with the reality.

See also/references:

[1] Smith, M.; Elder, L.; Emdon, H.. Open Development: A New Theory for ICT4D. Information Technologies & International Development, Spring 2011.

[2] Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2nd ed., p. 176). Penguin.

[3] Chambers, R. (2012). Provocations for Development. Practical Action Publishing.

[4] Y. Benkler, “The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and Freedom” 2007.

[5] Y. Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-interest (New York, NY: Crown Business, 2011).

[6] I. Buskens, The Importance of Intent: Reflecting on Open Development for Women’s Empowerment. Information Technologies & International Development, Spring 2011.

Contributors:

This article is a collaborative effort and remix, created through the contributions of all the people quoted above, and brought together by: Duncan Edwards (@duncan_ids), Linda Raftree (@meowtree), Mika Välitalo (@vatamik), Pernilla Näsfors (@pernillan), Sarah Johns (@geogrr), Claudia Schwegmann (@openAidGermany), and Matthew Smith (@openICT4D), and edited by Tim Davies (@timdavies).

The Open Development Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation operates as a space to share news, updates and discussions on open development. You can find the group mailing list at http://open-development.okfn.org

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#OKFest – Open Development Videos

Tim Davies - September 28, 2012 in okfest2012

Most of the sessions at the 2012 Open Knowledge Festival were streamed live and recorded. Take time to watch back the videos from the links below (you may need to skip the first few minutes on some of them to get to when the session really starts…). You can find all the recordings from the festival linked by room at http://okfestival.org/streams/.

Anything I missed? Drop in other suggested videos in the comments below…

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#okfest Open Development Blog posts

Tim Davies - September 23, 2012 in okfest2012

This post will try and collate links to all the write-ups of the Open Development track at the 2012 Open Knowledge Festival. If you know of a blog post we’ve missed, add a comment below and we’ll get the list updated.

And from other tracks, posts relevant to open development:

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Open Development lightning talks at OKFest 2012

Tim Davies - September 22, 2012 in okfest2012

With 90 minutes and 12 talks we covered a broad range of open development topics. You can find slidesand links for the talks below, or watch the full set from the live recording.

First up, Tim Davies introduced the Open Data special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics and the Open Data Research Network.

Then it was Anthea Seles of the International Records Management Trust outlining their exploration of the connection between open data and trusty record keeping (prezi).

Duncan Edwards of the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, spoke about their work to open up information and support innovation through developing an API onto their research databases (slideshare).

John Ndung’u of iLabAfrica spoke about the Kenya Open Data Initiative, sharing some of the lessons learned from the programme so far (slideshare).

We then had presentations from Open Data for Development Camp Nairobi participants, with Edward Omete of HealthInfo.co.ke talking about healthcare data, and Janet Maranga discussing the Ufahumu platform.

Francis Fuller Bbosa shared experiences from work on developing a civil society open data initiative in Uganda.

Sridhar Pabbisetty then outlined the work of Open Governance India, talking us through the importance of recognising the political edge to openness, and current transformations in democracy (slideshare).

We then moved to a number of institutional presentations, with input from:

Finally, Markien Gaanderse from Open for Change took us through some of the cultural shifts required from development organisations to engage in the open development world. Time and technology prevented us from showing it in the lightening talks, but many of the ideas from the session are summed up in Open for Change’s introduction to open development video:

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Rounding off the open-development stream at OKFest

Tim Davies - September 22, 2012 in okfest2012

In the closing plenary of OKFest 2012 the following video was shown to share some of the different experiences and insights from participants at the event:

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