Open and Shut — Our First Conference in Tweets!

Our first Open and Shut Conference just finished! We’re still very exhausted and it’ll take us a few days to present the detailed notes of the sessions at the conference — but we’re hoping the following series of tweets give a good idea of how it all played out:

To kick us off, Small Media’s Mahmood introduced the need for conversations around data in the Global South, and Katelyn from School of Data talking about the importance of — and how to promote — data literacy around the world.

For the first panel, our opening speaker presented about Small Media’s open data portal for Iran — Iran Open Data; Nick Doiron spoke about digitising election candidate data in Myanmar, Hazwany Jamaluddin spoke about adapting civic tech and open data tools across borders; and I spoke about a project called ‘Don’t Hold It In’, where we crowdsourced data for public toilets.

After the first panel, we had lightning talks from Nick Doiron talking about localising open data tools across different languages; Tom Walker talking about measuring the impact of data driven campaigns; Jeff Allen talking about crowdsourced election monitoring via SMS in West Africa; Simon Johnson talking about a new data exchange platform HDX; Marianne Bouchart talking about the new sensor journalism kit they’re building for Africa; and Jo Barratt introducing CKAN — the most widely used open data portal toolkit.

Then came the second panel. With Marianne Bouchart talking about award winning data journalism from closed societies; Yan Naung Oak talking about the challenges of building an open data community in Myanmar; Sam Leon talking about uncovering corruption through data-driven campaigns; and Mor Rubenstein reflecting on the current state of open data — a look at what’s been achieved and what’s next.

We rounded off the day with breakout group discussions. These covered the issues of data ethics, the process of building open data communities, adapting technologies for closed societies, assessing the impact of open data and strategies, tools and workflows when collecting data.

And towards the end, this is what some of the attendees thought..

All in all, it was a truly wonderful day. We initiated a much needed conversation on data in the Global South. This is however, just the beginning. We intend to do much more. Starting with a more detailed set of notes from the conference soon.

Open & Shut is a project from the Small Media team. Small Media is an organisation working to support freedom of information in closed societies, and developed the Iran Open Data portal.

Cover image by skp, story edited by James Marchant and Tom Ormson.