Sharing (data) is caring
mWater is a free and open data collection platform for water, sanitation, and health. In 2015, mWater is committed to collaborating with organizations that that also have the goal of creating open data access for water and sanitation. Today was an important first step.
Today, we at mWater took part in Global Water Challenge’s webinar, Sharing is Caring. The global interest in interoperable datasets was so exciting! At mWater, we like to say paper is where data goes to die. But the second leading cause of data death is silo’d data. Silos are formed when data is kept behind paywalls, stored in organization’s hard drives, or when data standards are so cryptic that even open access data can’t be used.
As mWater’s Chief Scientist John said in the webinar, sharing data has already lead to impressive policy changes. mWater loves working in Mwanza, Tanzania, because the local government embodies the term early adopter. They have welcomed mobile data collection into the ranks of frontline health workers, creating a ready team of crowd seeds—individuals trained on mobile data collection, armed with smartphones, ready to deploy any community-based mobile data collection activity at a moment’s notice. This can range from testing water sources for safety in the event of a cholera outbreak or querying households for readiness to pay in advance of a new water infrastructure investment.
From 2013–2014, Mwanza’s healthworkers and the local water utility’s water managers conducted water point mapping with mWater and logged water point safety using a simple and cheap E. coli test. The result was a map of Mwanza with water points and their safety status visualized in differently colored indicators. After 12 months of mapping and monitoring, one pattern was shockingly clear: virtually all shallow wells—even those carefully constructed with liners and fences, even those built within the last year—were contaminated. In the face of this evidence, the city changed its permitting policy to disallow the new construction of shallow wells by outside NGOs and inside water infrastructure expansion. Instead, safer water sources like boreholes and piped water kiosks would be encouraged.
This process of data collection leading to policy change was only possible because of a partnership built on open data collection and data sharing. It could have been far faster and even stronger, however, if the NGOs who also create, map, and monitor water sources in the region would have shared their data. It’s possible that NGOs wanted to partake, but had already invested in a different data collection platform than mWater and believed sharing would require taking up a new platform. This is what we need to change.
Moving toward interoperability of data, mWater can provide two solutions. First, we have a clear protocol for importing and exporting data that others can adopt. This approach is not the best to begin with because it assumes we have the best protocol and power-based disagreements could arise. Also, because this approach requires changing in-house standards, we believe beginning this way would cause an unnecessarily slow roll-out for larger organizations and companies. Instead, we propose data bridges.
In the webinar, one person asked who are the organizations committed to sharing data. As mWater’s CEO, I can speak for our side. mWater is not only committed to sharing data, we are devoted to it. This is why we exist. It would be our pleasure to collaborate with other organizations that are also working group members of the Water Point Data Sharing Standard. Together, we can build interoperability protocols, or bridges with which data can be exported from or imported into mWater without losing pre-existing formatting and important metadata such as unique IDs, attributes, type definitions, and photos.
From building just a few bridges, we can move quickly, within weeks rather than months, begin to A/B test what works and what doesn’t, ultimately moving through an iterative process to perfect a standard for future bridging. As opposed to the traditional aid procedures of proposing and funding a solution in advance of building and testing a product, this approach will allow for rapid iterations that can themselves reveal the best solutions. Moving forward, the first step is a Switzerland of water point data, of sorts, which can broker additional commitments. Global Water Challenge is well placed to play that role.
