{"id":1760,"date":"2016-06-03T09:08:59","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T09:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/labs.webfoundation.org\/id\/banda-aceh-where-good-coffee-and-open-data-meet\/"},"modified":"2016-06-09T04:27:43","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T04:27:43","slug":"banda-aceh-where-good-coffee-and-open-data-meet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/labs.webfoundation.org\/id\/banda-aceh-where-good-coffee-and-open-data-meet\/","title":{"rendered":"Banda Aceh: Where Good Coffee and Open Data Meet"},"content":{"rendered":"

My passion for open data almost rivals that of my passion for coffee. Almost, because nothing beats good, fresh, strong coffee. So naturally, it\u2019s a win-win experience for me when these two could meet – even abstractly – through one of our projects!<\/p>\n

Banda Aceh\u2019s taking big steps towards becoming an open data champion <\/b><\/p>\n

Banda Aceh is a city that has a lot going for it: great coffee, delicious food, and breathtaking nearby places to visit. Topping this, another notable aspect of the city is that it\u2019s one of the Indonesian cities working towards increased transparency and openness to allow for more citizen engagement through its open data initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This city\u2019s initiative, and with it our project in Banda Aceh<\/a>, started from the education sector, spread to health and other fields, and is now focused on the drafting of a Mayor\u2019s Regulation (Peraturan Walikota<\/i>). The drafting process was initiated after seeing the clear need for a legal framework for building better and more sustainable data management practices in Banda Aceh. Informed by the International Open Data Charter\u2019s principles<\/a> and working in collaboration with the local CSO GeRAK Aceh<\/a>, at the core of the revised city government\u2019s data management system will be an automatic linking of government-used applications that generate data to the city\u2019s open data portal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How we\u2019re making open data matter<\/b><\/p>\n

In addition to the technical assistance provided to the city government, in the past months we\u2019ve also enabled citizens in Banda Aceh to make use of open data through so-called \u201cData Processing Trainings\u201d. The way we see it, when civil society, activists and small businesses have access to data that show conditions of public service and are able to use it, they can influence policy-making and work with city officials to improve these very services and tackle urban challenges more effectively.<\/p>\n

\"Aceh_Banners\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Throughout the project, we\u2019ve seen the need for close collaboration between open data advocates, CSOs, and other communities – such as \u201ctech\u201d or ICT groups and bloggers. To address this, we held the first part of the Data Processing Training last December 2015 intent on fostering collaboration among those communities through capacity-building for data scraping, data cleaning and data visualisation<\/a>. The main activities were:<\/p>\n