[Spotlight] Data Reuse: Use cases, challenges, and opportunities
A Re-cap of ODC’s Implementation Working Group meeting on April 25, 2023
by Valentina Sisto, ODC Volunteer
What is data reuse?
In the context of an increasingly data driven society, the open data community has been advocating for the practice known as data reuse. This means using existing data for different purposes than it was originally collected for. When we think about the unlimited potential that new approaches to existing data pose in terms of arriving at innovative solutions to pressing social issues, we understand the importance of pushing this agenda. Luckily, many countries are making efforts to generate laws that support data reuse and it is crucial to further these initiatives so as to address the challenges around data reuse, its availability, usability, integrity and security.
This month’s Implementation Working Group meeting shed light on data reuse by featuring three speakers that have all participated in the development of projects based on repurposed data.
Data reuse in action
The first speaker was Kaye Sklar, senior programme manager of Lift, a programme that belongs to Open Contracting Partnership, a non profit organization which works with governments, civil society and the private sector to achieve systemic reform for public procurement around the world. The organization has an open government and open data approach to work with teams of reformers around specific issues and goals.
She described three cases in which collaboration between government and civil societies had a positive impact in procurement:
- Democratizing public procurement in Ecuador
- Better health providing in Moldova
- Improving flood related procurement decision-making in Assam, India
In the first case, working around the goal of creating a more transparent, open and accountable ecosystem, the team was able to decrease the use of special regimes, increase vendor participation as well as open procedures, and create a positive feedback mechanism in Ecuador. These results were possible thanks to the interaction between public officials and civil society using the data. While the government was opening their procurement information in an appropriate format for civil society to use, civil society was also working on gaining the skills necessary to use the data.
The second case brought together a government and civil society partnership aimed to increase access to HIV and tuberculosis medicines in Moldova, a country with some of the highest rates of patients in Europe. Some great results were achieved, like 19% savings on HIV medicine budget, as well as 15.4% savings on medical procurement transactions overall.
The last case took place in Assam, a state in India that is home to regular flooding events each year. To improve flood-related procurement, Civic Data Lab, a social entrepreneur organization, brought together fiscal, geospatial and socio-economic data to understand the relationship between those places of greatest need and the way the money is being spent. This work showed the potential of data in improving the lives of people in a place that, like many others around the world, still has a very paper-based closed procurement system. Kaye highlighted that by working across policy, processes and data all together, great impact can be achieved.
Our second speaker was Marisa Cirillo, director of CEMPRE, a non-profit organization based in Uruguay working with private-public projects on circular economy. Marisa spoke about the Strategic Waste Visualizer, a project they launched last year with the objective of raising awareness about the issue of waste in Montevideo consisted of integrating and making available information that was otherwise difficult to access. They used diverse data sources like the Montevideo Mayor, the Dónde Reciclo/Where do I recycle app (which they had previously developed), the Chamber of Industries of Uruguay, the National Census and the Catalog of Open Data, and integrated information about production, infrastructure and management of waste.
Based on the data, they created a map that reflects how unbalanced the existing infrastructure and the demands of the population are. The map highlighted that medium and low income areas have less access to waste bins and classifiers. Based on their findings, they made some recommendations in relation to the use of data for future projects of this sort. These mostly centered around the issues of control of the information reporting on behalf of the private sector, as well as the standardization of primary data to facilitate its load on the system. These were difficulties which Marisa emphasized they encountered when trying to access the information they needed.
The last speaker, Andrés Gomis Fons, has been the general director of Transparency, Citizen Attention and Good Governance of the Generalitat Valenciana since 2019. He presented their open data strategy which is based on two pillars: generating a cultural change in the public administration in terms of making data open by design and default, and generating an ecosystem of data reusers. Faced with the realization that there weren’t many re-users with whom to interact in the city, they developed different actions to map the existing reusers and enhanced their collaboration, as well as creating a data culture in society through education, in order to increase the amount of data re-users. They also developed activities like an open data datathon, a series of interviews with women from the data community, an Observatory of Public Digital Transformation with Universities and a programme of training for data reusers. This last programme educated journalists and people from the private sector to improve the way they use of data.
Andrés emphasized how important it is for the administration to build a web of alliances with different actors (e.g. local governments, civil society, the private sector, universities) because they understand that these groups can achieve goals beyond their scope. These alliances engage influential groups of Valencia making room for advances in open government and transparency culture.
All in all the three presentations provided examples of what can be achieved when a variety of groups in an ecosystem of society sees value in the reuse of data. However, we are still faced with some challenges that were addressed in the meeting. Looking ahead, it’s important to raise more social awareness around the use of data, as well as ensuring standardization and interoperability, and finally, ensuring that transparency that brings different groups together, meets a certain level of transparency.
Watch the session here. If you would like to join our next Implementation Working Group meeting on 23 May, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: info@opendatacharter.org.
