Comments on: Promoting transparency through open data

By: The State of e-Governance/e-Government in Africa | Blog.Avi

The State of e-Governance/e-Government in Africa | Blog.Avi — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:52:08 +0000

[...] Kenyan government is all set to unveil its Open Data initiative; its aim at opening up the repositories of varied datasets to the public for public [...]

By: OGDI V2.0 « live-to-code

OGDI V2.0 « live-to-code — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:00:13 +0000

[...] page and saw a wall post of a friend. It says “Kenya leads by launching Africa’s 1st OpenData portal opening gov to hackivists & social entrepreneurs”, and today I found out that they [...]

By: Open Data Catches on in Kenya – Forbes (blog) | Get News, Articles and other Informations

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:07:27 +0000

[...] levels in the United States. With the launch of Open Kenya, Africa will have its own story of promoting transparency through open data to celebrate, learn from and [...]

By: Open Data Catches on in Kenya | Financial Publicity

Open Data Catches on in Kenya | Financial Publicity — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:49:53 +0000

[...] levels in the United States. With the launch of Open Kenya, Africa will have its own story of promoting transparency through open data to celebrate, learn from and [...]

By: Kenya launches Open Government Data Portal » The Hybrid Self

Kenya launches Open Government Data Portal » The Hybrid Self — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:09:27 +0000

[...] *iHub Nairobi’s Innovation Hub [...]

By: The State of e-Governance/e-Government in Africa | Afrinnovator

The State of e-Governance/e-Government in Africa | Afrinnovator — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:01:41 +0000

[...] EmailThe Kenyan government is all set to unveil its Open Data initiative, an aim at opening up it’s repositories of varied datasets to the public for public consumption [...]

By: George

George — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:06:25 +0000

Please correct this.
1. CSV and not cvs.
2. What is Excel? Did you mean .XLS? I think it would be better to keep the data in pure ascii formats(CSV) and the users can utilise whatever third party tools they have. (kick the Microsoft == computers crap!
3. What do you mean by API for each dataset? Do you mean an API supporting different programming languages. I bet is should be implemeted as a RESTful interface!
4. Most public data? vs much public data?
5. How does open data really increase accountability?

By: Joel Selanikio

Joel Selanikio — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:38:06 +0000

Getting the Kenyan government to even set up a government data portal is an enormous step forward in establishing norms for transparency, and I congratulate those involved.

I also think that your list of four criteria to define “open” area a good start, but they really define “usable”, rather than “open”. What you are leaving off is some measure of completeness: are the citizens seeing 5% of the total data or 95%? Maybe we can call it the “transparency fraction”?

The end goal, after all, is not to have the Kenyan government (or any government) release 25% of its important data in perfectly shareable, searchable, and machine-readable format, but rather for ALL of Kenya’s government data to be available for citizen scrutiny AND in usable format.

The difficult task won’t be to get Kenya to meta-tag the fraction of data it does release and make it available as csv; it will be to get Kenya to release the really important and controversial stuff, like politician’s expenses, and documents related to bidding for government projects, etc. And to have some idea of whether Kenya’s citizens are seeing 25% or 90% of the good stuff. That is, what is the “transparency fraction”?

By: Links zum Thema E-Demokratie vom 4. Juli 2011 » Links » E-Demokratie.org

Links zum Thema E-Demokratie vom 4. Juli 2011 » Links » E-Demokratie.org — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:37:30 +0000

[...] Kenia plant den Start eines Open Data Portal zur Veröffentlichung von Regierungsdaten am 8. Juli 2011. [...]