When: Thursday 20 September 2012, 11.30 – 17.30 (or longer if you want)
Where: HACK workshop1 at OKFestival, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (Hämeentie 135 C, Helsinki, Finland)
Sign up: Participation is free and registration in advance not necessary, but if you want to make sure to get one of the 20 seats and some lunch, please let us know that you plan to come, by e-mailing [email protected].
Description: How can we use aid and government spending data to answer questions about development? Big amounts of money are spent each year on aid and development projects around the world. Where does the money go and what has it achieved? Is it possible to find correlations between how money is being spent and how the lives of people are improving? What tools would help make this information more accessible?
On this hack day, we want to bring together hacks and hackers, developers and development practitioners, to interrogate recently released data on development spending and finance. We want you to explore the limits of the data and be a part of demonstrating the added value of open data, how it can make a difference to how aid and development is done.
The event is part of the Open Development topic stream at Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki 17-21 September 2012, but you don’t need to take part in the whole festival in the hack day. Experts on datasets such as the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) will be present to help you get going quickly and to show what tools are already available for exploring the data. Further info about the challenges and suggested datasets to work with can be found here on https://developmentdatachallenge.org. You can read about the previous DDC in London in The Guardian.
There is also a possibility to continue on what you learn and build during the hack on the following day. The largest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, invites coders, designers, journalists and open data activists to the HS Open Datajournalism Hackathon on Friday the 21st. Groups of three will build visualizations or applications that use development data from e.g. the World Bank. The goal is to tell a visual story on global health, children’s welfare or inequality around the world. Registration for the HS Open Datajournalism Hackathon is done separately on http://okfestival.org/hs-open-datajournalism-hackathon/.
The hack day is supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and Finland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in cooperation with aidinfo, DFID, The Guardian, Open Aid Register, Open Knowledge Foundation, Publish What You Fund, and World Bank Finances.
Contact Pernilla Näsfors at or @pernillan on Twitter if you have any questions.
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I am the coordinator of UNDP Crisis and Recovery Mapping and Analyis (CRMA) project in South Sudan, which is supportring the Information Management Working Group (IMWG) that packages the data in geo-spatial layers to support analysis and planning. This data is collated through data sharing agreement among government institutions, UN agencies and NGOs under the auspices of teh National Bureau of Statistics. It might be a good idea to invite the NBS GIS director to attend the meeting and showcase the work done in South Sudan under very difficult circumstances, and to share ideas on how to make this information more accessible for donors and programmes.
Some really interesting points you have written. Aided me a lot, just what I was looking for : D.
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