You’ve hopefully come across our announcements, but we’ll still say it once again: next week, from the 22nd to the 24th of November, the Southeast Asia Open Data Innovation Week will take place! The event is a collaboration between the Web Foundation’s Open Data Lab Jakarta and Goethe-Institut Indonesien, with the support of Making All Voices Count and Ford Foundation, and aims to gather innovators from across the Asia-Pacific region. We’ll be building tools to improve the design, practice and implementation of open data initiatives because we believe open data can help solve the region’s most pressing social challenges. That’s a real mouthful, so we broke down the highlights for you—read on to learn more about why we’re doing this project, or skip down to see the participants and public event agenda!
 

Details

Public Event Date: 24 November 2016, 16:00 to 20:00
Venue: Sequis Centre Auditorium, 11th floor
Reservations: Visit our EventBrite page to reserve your ticket.

Closed-door Workshop: 22-24 November 2016
Reservations: By invite only.
 

Why we’re doing this and what we hope to achieve

Open data is not for the faint-hearted: it requires persistence, dedication and patience not only to open up data but also make sense of it. Since our launch in 2014, we’ve witnessed the growth of open data across the globe, and we at the Jakarta Lab think it’s notable that open data is finally starting to evolve from a niche endeavor to the mainstream of public service delivery. More governments are implementing it, more civil society organisations are using it, and more citizens are benefiting from it than ever before.

In Indonesia, this development is reflected by national and local governments proactively publishing data on the national portal and sub-national portals from Jakarta, Bandung and Banda Aceh. On the civil society front, examples of organisations working with open data include Perludem on election data, Publish What You Pay Indonesia on data from the extractives industry, Indonesia Procurement Watch on procurement data, and the Jakarta Lab, with projects tackling fiscal transparency, health, open cities and more.

However, open data has only begun to scratch the surface of its potential, and there are several factors holding back progress. A major factor identified is the strong focus on outputs like portals, apps and platforms. While these outputs are important, many organisations and governments fail to bridge these products with social impact.

With the Southeast Asia Open Data Innovation Week, our end goal is to equip the open data community with tools – and by tools we don’t mean tech products but more methods, approaches and tactics – to design and implement better, more impactful open data projects in the region. Through a closed-door workshop, we will collaborate with the participants to build the ‘open data innovation toolbox’, which will have methods and approaches to help with assessing dataset usability, environment mapping, stakeholders and relations analysis, and more. At the end of it, we’re holding a public event for the participants to present their tools to the public, particularly targeting those working in the innovation, tech and open data space.

In the coming weeks following the workshop, we will publish all the tools in open license online for anyone and everyone to freely use and build upon.
 

We hope to see you at the public event! If you have any questions on the above event, contact denise@webfoundation.org. You can also check out our other events for that week, including an exhibit launch for “Data2Life. Life2Data.”, which features a photography exhibition capturing the impact of data on daily lives, a forum on Women’s Rights Online, and a user experience training!

If you’d like to know more about the Jakarta Lab and our projects, visit the Lab’s website. You can also follow us on Twitter @ODLabJkt and regularly check our blog to get the latest updates from us.