Interview with the Open Data Advisory Team at the World Bank

In reference to the Open Government Data Working Group of the World Bank, could you explain how the entity contributes to the opening and re-use of public information?

The World Bank has been providing technical assistance, capacity building and funding for developing countries’ Open Data programs since 2012. Its activities can be summarized under four domains: (a) tools, (b) technical assistance, (c) capacity building and (d) networks and inter-institutional collaboration.

On tools for open data, the Bank publishes and continually updates an Open Data Toolkit Open Data Toolkit that provide a set of curated resources for initiating or deepening an open data program. The tools include basic explanation of what is open data; advice on open data licensing and technology options, training opportunities, research, examples of apps and other uses of open data by sector and many other similar tools. Some of these tools have been developed by the World Bank, but the large majority have been developed by other institutions.

On technical assistance and funding, most developed countries are already harvesting the economic and social benefits that Open Government Data brings about, thus, one of the objectives of the World Bank is to take that knowledge and similar Open Data programs to developing countries. Currently, the World Bank has around 26 Open Data-related lending projects at different completion stages that are being, totally or partially financed, by one of the two lending windows of the World Bank: IBRD or IDA. Some of these projects also have a significant trust fund component.

“One of the objectives of the World Bank is to take that knowledge and similar Open Data programs to developing countries.”

The Bank has primarily focused on two approaches for capacity development on use and engagement with open data.  The first approach has been to collaborate with civic hacker communities around opened data, through an array of generally low-cost hackathons (including on ‘hackable’ questions in key development areas, such as domestic violence, water quality and access, and sanitation).  The second approach is more time and resource-intensive – it focuses on short term ‘open data bootcamps’ or long-term ‘deep dive’ open data training and efforts to institutionalize a ‘culture’ of open data among government and non-government groups.  This approach prioritizes the strengthening of sustainable, endemic (self-reinforcing) capacity and use of open data up and down value chains without subsequent external support.  Additional examples include efforts to integrate teaching curricula on open data into university environments and to integrate open data into private sector business models.

The World Bank has been a main sponsor of the last 3 International Open Data Conferences (Washington 2012, Ottawa 2015 and Madrid 16) and has committed to sponsor the next one (Argentina 2018). The Bank is a funder and founding member of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) program, along with the Canadian Government, the International Development Research Center and DFID. Both directly and through OD4D the Bank also sponsors regional conferences, such as ConDatos (official conference) and AbreLatam (unconference) in Latin America, Africa Open Data conferences and similar ones in other regions that host developing countries. Lastly, the Bank is also a member, but not always a leader, of other global groups that work on Open Data for Development, such as the Open Data Working Group of the OGP, the Open Contracting Data Partnership, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, The Open Data Charter and others.

Among the functions of the working group, what would you highlight and what are their lines of action? In what projects is the group currently immersed?

One of the most important tools in the Toolkit is the Open Data Readiness Assessment (ODRA), a quick diagnostic and action plan builder, tailored to each country’s legislation, institutions and demand/supply of data. The ODRA includes analysis and recommendations in 8 areas: leadership, policy/legal framework, institutions & capacities, data supply, data demand, civic engagement and capability, funding, and national IT infrastructure. ODRA assessments and the resulting reports are joint products of a small Government team and a Bank team. The methodology can be applied at the national, sub-national, city or agency level. Sectoral adaptations of the methodology have been done for energy and transport. The next section has more information on the countries where ODRAs have been done.

As explained above, there are currently 26 active projects financed by a combination of Bank’s own budget, trust funds, IBRD or IDA, or a combination of these. Since 2012 we have supported around 45 open data initiatives in developing countries.

When IBRD or IDA projects count with full government support, ODRA implementation and other related Open Data initiatives can be deepened and expanded, since IDA/IBRD projects assign larger amounts and take several years of implementation. Also, once the Open Data initiative or ODRA implementation is concluded, there is a great possibility to use Open Data applications to shed light on some individual sectors of the economy that need more technical support or financial assistance from IBRD or IDA.

 “Since 2012 we have supported around 45 open data initiatives in developing countries.”

 How do you think that opening up public information and citizen participation in government processes can boost development in emerging economies? Could you illustrate this with some real cases?

When data are made widely available and easy to use, the benefits can be significant. Broadly speaking, the benefits of Open Data include:

• Transparency. Open Data supports public oversight of governments and helps reduce corruption by enabling greater transparency. For instance, Open Data makes it easier to monitor government activities, such as tracking public budget expenditures and impacts. It also encourages greater citizen participation in government affairs and supports democratic societies by providing information about voting procedures, locations and ballot issues.
• Public Service Improvement. Open Data gives citizens the raw materials they need to engage their governments and contribute to the improvement of public services. For instance, citizens can use Open Data to contribute to public planning, or provide feedback to government ministries on service quality.
• Innovation and Economic Value. Public data, and their re-use, are key resources for social innovation and economic growth. Open Data provides new opportunities for governments to collaborate with citizens and evaluate public services by giving citizens access to data about those services. Businesses and entrepreneurs are using Open Data to better understand potential markets and build new data-driven products.
• Efficiency. Open Data makes it easier and less costly for government ministries to discover and access their own data or data from other ministries, which reduces acquisition costs, redundancy and overhead. Open Data can also empower citizens with the ability to alert governments to gaps in public datasets and to provide more accurate information.

Several concrete examples of the use of Open Data in specific countries and sectors can be found here.

It will take time to fully understand the complexity and broad potential of Open Data, as the benefits of Open Data impact on broader populations and additional useful options are continuously discovered.

The World Bank has its own open data portal. You could mention some outstanding project - visualization, service, app ... - that has reused the information of the platform and that has had a positive social impact in its environment.

The World Bank provides several tools to enable use of its own data. These include the Bank’s Open Data website and Databank, which allow users to search, visualize and download development data quickly and easily. The Bank also provides data via application programming interfaces (APIs), which has enabled the development of many third-party apps and greatly expanded the ways in which Bank data can be put to use.

Here are some examples:

• Google incorporates development data from the World Bank into its search engine. Searches for common, country-level development indicators such as GDP of Ethiopia typically produce a visualization of relevant data, sourced from the World Bank’s open data API.
• StatPlanet allows users to select and visualize over 3,000 development indicators for nearly every dimension of economic, social and human development. StatPlanet was the winner of the World Bank’s Apps for Development competition, and its technology has been incorporated into the Bank’s EdStats education data portal.
• Save the Rain is an app that uses World Bank open data to estimate the agricultural impacts of small-scale water conservation on a local scale. Save the Rain was one of the finalists in the World Bank’s Apps for Climate competition.
• WB Panorama is another Apps for Climate finalist that uses World Bank open data to show the impact of climate change on crop yields and local living conditions.

In addition, open data best practices enable other governments and organizations to redistribute World Bank data with virtually no transaction costs. For example, when Edo State, Nigeria launched its open data portal in 2014, it copied open data for that region from the World Bank as a way to augment its own data offerings. Open data allowed Edo State to provide its citizens with a broader set of useful data in a single repository than would have been possible otherwise.

Following your participation in the last edition of the International Open Data Conference held in Madrid. How would you rate the current state of the open data sector on a global scale? What immediate needs do you detect and what do you consider to be the next steps necessary to move forward in openness?

While open data is showing signs of increasing maturity in developed countries and some developing countries, the state of progress is heterogeneous and its impact is hard to measure.  Why is open data succeeding in some contexts and failing to achieve traction in others? Open data is more useful and actionable when it is a strategic element of a larger development initiative and not pushed forward as a standalone issue. There is evidence that open data is progressing where it is aligned with other important agendas such as the climate change or national development plans, as well as with regional and sector-specific discussions, for example standards and best practices in contracting, statistics, transport, open cities’ data and more.  There is also noticeable interest in business models for open data. The future of open data is largely linked to the extent to which the agendas and activities of the organizations and individuals within the open data community align around concrete, shared priorities. 

Realizing the potential of open data for decision-making requires making open data and its applications work for everyone, creating tools for a broad audience and identifying data to be opened based on larger efforts to improve the lives of all people, including the poor, the marginalized, and the chronically underserved.

“The future of open data is largely linked to the extent to which the agendas and activities of the organizations and individuals within the open data community align around concrete, shared priorities.”

In contrast to previous years, the Madrid Conference showed that National Statistical Offices (‘NSOs’) are emerging as a potentially important stakeholder group. This is a qualitative leap for open data in developing countries, where NSOs are often the primary (if not the only) source of high-quality, official data.

Advocates for grassroots open data initiatives in many developing countries need financial, material, and human support. The international community is increasingly interested in data for development. However, it is unclear whether open data has the same level of priority in their agenda. Also, models for implementation that work in the developed world may need to be reconsidered, and merged with other approaches that recognize different circumstances in developing countries.  With this in mind, the business case for open data still needs to be showcased wherever possible (e.g. public services’ efficiencies resulting from open data, contributions to economic growth, job creation, etc.)

Another challenge in developing country contexts is the availability of quality data, on a predictable and frequent schedule and with enough metadata to make it useful for reuse. Use of common taxonomies is essential to extract maximum value from data already opened, and I think we are just starting on this.