The last of the workshops for the ‘Opening Data for Better Education in Aceh’ project is done – at least for the moment. With a big part of the Open Data Lab’s Jakarta team flying over to Banda Aceh, the 3-day final workshop was held from 09 -12 December 2014 in the Bappeda office of Banda Aceh City, with participants coming from civil society, media and government.
The project aimed to enable local organisations – e.g. civil society groups, academic institutions, media and journalists – to use open data to improve outcomes in the education sector in the city of Banda Aceh. It was implemented in partnership with Kinerja and together with the Banda Aceh City government and GeRAK Aceh. The previous two workshops were held in November, and focused on the themes of identifying data needs from civil society organisations (in relation to education) as well as identifying the available data to be provided by the government. Tying these together, the third workshop centered on building the capacities of the local organisations to utilise the provided data for public consumption and governance improvement.
Kicking off the final workshop, we used methods such as puzzle-completion games to break the ice, as well as to form groups for the various data categories. Other topics included offline and online visualisations wherein the participants not only created the viewable designs and materials, but presented them as well in the succeeding days. Wrapping it all up – from the final workshop to the prior ones -, a public event was held on the final day.
The public event was meant to have both current and past participants of the workshops mingle, and give a chance for the organisations and media involved to showcase their works and results from the final training. This included a ‘voting’, wherein everyone present gave their top choices for the offline and online visualisations, and afterwards we announced the winners together with their well-deserved prizes!
Although the project is officially finished, we will continue assisting the Banda Aceh City government and civil society organisations in their continued push for open data in and beyond the education sector. For more information, visit our project page, contact us, or check out the Flickr album to see the going-ons.
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