So what’s the fuss about this #Opendata party in
the South South of Nigeria – It will be held in one of the
cleanest city in Africa – Calabar, and will be hosted in a state that has the most
comforting tourist attraction in West Africa – the Obudu Mountain
Resort! If you think there is another like it in the region, please
comment below ;) and one other thing about Calabar is the attributes to
their women, and just for clarification – Calabar remains the
capital city of Cross River State.
Right on time at the popular Mirage Hotel on
October 15, 2014 was the Open data party that had 15 participants from
different NGOs, citizens and this time we had some government officials – thus
making it interesting. Whenever you have these three groups locked on a round
table – questions like: why didn’t you make the data available, why didn’t you
reply our FOIA, didn’t we make funding available for you to monitor, what
happened to all the international aid you get, all come up, and as a
facilitator – you are lost!
With my experience teaching data with NGOs,
journalists and citizens, it is still clear that few of the practitioners know
where even the little data available is hidden online. “It is appalling that we
all here don’t know where the federal government budget is being published”
affirmed Onoche Mokwunye. I get this answer often in all my sessions, which
makes us conclude at times that the simple skill of finding data (secondary)
itself and what their interest was in data, remains important.
In trying to figure out what kind of data they were
interested in 40% of the participants were interested in budget data of the country; 30% were
interested in contract data (in essence, the issue of money, and
how it’s been used is important), while the remaining 30% was shared amongst election data, environmental data, infrastructure data, and transport data
(which seems not to be available). Going forward did they really know where to
find this data? KNOW! Well, it will be important to state that the Nigerian
government has recently focused on some open data initiatives, even though it
is not as if these portals make data available in machine readable format.
One may think, since we wouldn’t know where to
find, or how to get the data, analyzing data might be a great challenge, of
course NO! This group had great knowledge of diving into excel spreadsheets –
maybe I knew only one way of handling some task before, now I learnt two more
ways – that was the most interesting part of this data party! So what else, how
do we present this datasets using several visualizations and infographic. “I
have seen several colourful visualizations (online) that people in our
communities cannot relate with, as such we still need to break it down in the
language they will understand (offline) – maybe that’s an added task for us”
explained Benny from AfterSchool Peer Mentoring Project
Just before the end of the sessions, participants
already concluded to have another 2-day Open Data Party,, while they declared
having step down training in their own communities. When our Open Data party
ends within 8 hours, participants are at times heartbroken! “Are we going to
continue tomorrow, I seem to be an information and skill overload in a short time”
– mentioned Ndoma Mayor in a phone call with me. Truly, does our party end in 8
hours? What happens to the” party” behind Open data – we always rock the club,
after all, we are in Calabar, where the female become goddess at night! And if
you want to know where our next open data party will be happening: most definitely
– Abuja, No thanks to Connected Development [CODE] and Indigo Trust UK
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See more at:
http://schoolofdata.org/2014/10/28/catch-us-if-you-can-the-opendata-party-moves-to-calabar/#sthash.Edn8fXTa.dpuf
