Celebrating International Open Data Day in Ethiopia
March 5 2016 was International Open Data Day. And to mark the occasion, my colleagues and I at Code4Ethiopia hosted an event in Addis Ababa to bring together dozens of people interested in open data.
Around 25 participants from universities, non-government organisations, civil society organisations and government ministries joined the event which was focused on raising open data awareness among the grassroot community of Ethiopia.
The event was organised by Code4Ethiopia and Open Knowledge Ethiopia with support from the Open Knowledge Foundation and Addis Ababa University (AAU).
The Open Data Day event was opened by Mesfin Gezehagn, a librarian at AAU. Mr Mesfin explained how AAU has been providing training on open research data and open science to postgraduate students and academicians. AAU hopes to see more researchers practicing open data sharing (making data free to use, reuse and redistribute) and open science (making scientific research, data and work flows available to all). He also stated that AAU collaborates with open data communities like Open Knowledge Ethiopia and Code4Ethiopia.
Mr Mesfin also informed the participants that AAU has started drafting a policy to ensure mandatory submission of data for projects that are sponsored by the university so that they can open the data to the public.
Following the opening, three of the Code4Ethiopia cofounders (myself, Melkamu Beyene and Teshome Alemu) joined forces with Desalegn Mequanint, a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science of AAU, to present discussion areas for participants. Our presentations were focused on the work of Code4Ethiopia and Open Knowledge Ethiopia, as well as sharing open data experiences from other African countries and the social, cultural and economic factors affecting open data implementation in Ethiopia.
Next the workshop was opened for discussion by Daniel Beyene, another co-founder of Code4Ethiopia. Participants recommended that advocacy should be done from the top down starting with policymakers working with the grassroot open data community in Ethiopia. It was also proposed that Code4Ethiopia and Open Knowledge Ethiopia should organise a national sensitisation open data hackathon - in association with international partners - to reach more stakeholders.
The workshop also identified challenges in Ethiopia for open data implementation including a lack of awareness, absence of policy level commitment from governments and a lack of appropriate data science skills or data literacy.
The event was concluded by thanking our partners Open Knowledge and AAU for their contribution to the success of the event. All of the participants have now been invited to join Code4Ethiopia and the local Open Knowledge community to help build the open data ecosystem in Ethiopia.
Read more on Open Data Day:
Solomon Mekonnen is a co-founder of Code4Ethiopia and a local organiser of Open Knowledge Ethiopia.
