Open data movements mustn’t lose sight of the issues we are trying to solve
Open data has long been lauded as a key component in achieving the SDGs’ targets and measuring their progress. The UN set an ambitious goal for 2030 to progress on the 17 SDGs, with open data viewed as a means of accelerating this progress.
Open Data Day, celebrated this year over the week of March 2nd–8th, has a theme of ‘Open Data for Advancing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’. This is partly in response to the recognition of CKAN as a Digital Public Good, intending to explore how open data is a key player in helping achieve the UN’s SDGs.
Reflecting upon this year’s theme helps us acknowledge that the Open Development Initiative (ODI) was initially born out of a need for access to information and data on broad sustainable development projects that were then and still are today being implemented opaquely across the Mekong. The Open Development Mekong (ODM) platform, which is driven by a CKAN database, was initiated to specifically support open data principles of data sharing across Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The initiative was the first to provide an open data ecosystem in the Mekong and national languages. Since its inception, it has transformed into a network advocating for not only data rights but support for digital rights and inclusion of access to technologies that are relevant to citizens’ needs and accessible across the Mekong region.
Along this journey, we have realised that providing data alone does not create an environment that enables us to utilise it in ways that would affect change. These are some of the lessons we have learnt.
Southeast Asia, especially the Mekong region, still has significant gaps between data availability and reuse. While there have been improvements in data capacities and availability, ‘open data’ does not always translate into impact. The Mekong region is marred with weak governance and is subject to a lack of political will to release data and information deemed in the public interest. While there may be the intention to release the data, institutional capacities, protocols/standards, and infrastructure limit the possibility of doing so. This creates an environment of data scarcity and secrecy where data is often either entirely unavailable, inaccessible or, if available, guarded as a means of power. Participation in digital spaces requires digital literacy, and although technology penetration has accelerated across the Mekong, data literacy (specifically analytical skills) remains poor. This is further exacerbated by digital divides, which present unequal access to opportunities to build these skills, to technology itself and connectivity.
To address these issues, we have partnered with local organisations in the region to develop context-driven data literacy training programs for all people in the Mekong to participate in data collection, aggregation, and dissemination more effectively. The program supports local partners of the lower Mekong countries and a broad audience of local stakeholders in specific contexts such as forestry, pollution, lands, and Indigenous Peoples’ (IPs) rights. Myanmar was the first pilot country to implement the full training curriculum in 2018. Under our Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) and the Voices for Mekong Forests (V4MF) programming, it has since been replicated and customised in Cambodia, Vietnam, Lao PDR, Thailand, and Myanmar to meet specific needs, context, and pandemic situations.
Part of our exploration into existing digital and data divides led us to conduct a study to examine gender inequalities in the open data landscape across the Mekong. In this study, a common set of issues was found across the region: Poor institutional support for increasing access to information; Deeply entrenched and as-yet unaddressed gendered cultural norms; and Lack of true leadership and inclusivity. These institutionalised barriers prevent women from being included in decision-making processes related to developments, environmental governance and policy making. The water sector is an area of focus due to the reliance upon the Mekong River, where despite well-articulated policies and agendas to include women and other socially marginalised groups, their inclusion remains tokenistic, rendering efforts ineffective. The increase in the use of digital technologies in advocacy and decision-making has furthered and exacerbated the harms towards women replicating physical harms in digital spaces.
As a result, in 2023, we embarked on an initiative to bolster a safe space for women, namely the “Women in Water Governance (WIWG) Platform Project”. We have formed a 12-member Steering Committee from six countries across Southeast Asia to lead the co-creation of a platform that prioritises safety for themselves and those within their communities and extended networks. Women leaders recognised that through storytelling, they could share their local knowledge of water resource management in ways that would represent their contributions to water governance, speak to and be accessible to other women, and respond to the growing digital security threats affecting women environmental defenders. Targeting trust-building and digital literacy skills among the women leaders and networks has been critical.
The ODI focal constituents have always been marginalised Indigenous Peoples whose lived realities are affected by generations of oppression, colonialism, and neocolonialism. As a strong advocate of the Open Data principles and the charter, we had to acknowledge that although the movement had its merits, it didn’t represent data rights equally. This has shifted our data focus within the ODI to support the inclusion of IPs’ data rights by supporting Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) across the Mekong region.
The concept of IDS is for the deliberate return of the control of data back to IPs to shift power imbalances. To this extent, ODI has supported the rights of IPs to govern the collection, ownership, and application of the data critical to their ability to control policy decisions and establish fairer allocation of natural resources in the Mekong region. In this effort, we have supported partners through the Asian Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) to draft the first-ever Asian Indigenous Knowledge and Data Sovereignty framework. We are excited to continue to build upon the inclusion of these principles into local policies and through building protocols and standards for indigenous data that would meet the needs of indigenous communities.
Program shifts led our initiative to be more cognizant of digital technology trends and heightened our awareness that the digitisation of our world is leaving most of the population in Asia behind and notably rendering IPs invisible. Thus, the advent of AI and LLM tools and technologies into mainstream aspects of our lives have seemingly been sold as beneficial, yet generative AI has already facilitated an increase in harmful content being created and shared, such as deep fake pornographic representations of both celebrities and ordinary people. The ODI has recognised that AI utilised to address climate change and other environmental crises is likely to further disenfranchise IPs of lands and territories. Recent research that we have undertaken, to be released shortly, showcases and argues for greater inclusion of IDS and border environmental human rights values are necessary for an equitable data ecosystem and digital public infrastructure.
Our experiences in implementing the Open Development Mekong platform has emphasised that open data is not a panacea for solving the world’s development agendas. Gaps remain between the availability of data and its usage and fundamental systemic issues that require progress on such issues as human rights, governance and justice. Real change requires an intersectional approach, with a true commitment to inclusivity alongside supporting broad access to digital tools, skills, and information. Particularly, issues faced by women and Indigenous and Ethnic Minority groups are at risk of being exacerbated by the continued development and deployment of AI-driven technologies and the continued exclusion of these communities in regulatory developments, governance within AI systems and overall decision-making processes.
The SDGs set forth a set of indicators that guide us in measuring humanitarian improvements broadly. For open data to effectively contribute to the SDGs, practitioners must recognise that data alone is insufficient; we must focus on the end agendas we strive to reach. Open data is just a tool with a purpose that allows tracking of SDG indicators; how we meet the goals themselves is not about whether data is open or not. Data alone is not going to solve these global issues; building data ecosystems that support collectivised approaches to data governance and decision making will.
