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Delivering introductory remarks at Caribbean Internet Governance Forum

This week is Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Week in St. Maarten in the Caribbean.  St. Maarten, which is moving toward self-governance later this year, and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union are sponsoring this important convocation of businesses, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and citizens young and not-so-young to “foster development and transform societies and economies”.

The start of the week featured the 6th annual Caribbean Internet Governance Forum.  I was invited to lead discussion on the subject of “Executing the Paradigm Shift: From eGovernment to oGovernment”.  The focus was on potential benefits, and realistic costs, of a relationship between government and citizens based on Open Government Data.

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{http://datos.fundacionctic.org/sandbox/catalog/map Catalog from CTIC.}

Within less than a year, the United Kingdom and United States have put hundreds of thousands of rich datasets on the Web in machine readable formats. Thousands of applications have been built — the vast majority without taxpayers’ money — by civic hackers to analyze, mash-up, and map these data. Potential benefits of an Open Government Data (OGD) practice include new services, new insights, increased citizen participation, new businesses and better governance. Though other countries, provinces and cities are exploring OGD, there has been little activity in low and middle income countries (see map at left). Given the potential benefits and reasonable costs, it is importance to assess how relevant an OGD initiative might be in these countries as well.

The World Wide Web Foundation, with the our partner Fundacion (CTIC), is taking the first steps in this direction.   We are starting a new project to conduct an assessment of the feasibility and potential of an OGD program in three diverse countries — Chile, Ghana and Turkey.  The bottom line questions are:  Is the country ready to engage in an OGD initiative?  If so, what support might they need?  If not, why not, and what lesson can we take away from this assessment?

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The “Citizen Cyberscience” movement builds on the success of projects like SETI@Home and GalaxyZoo — which leverage the brainpower of millions of people, as well as their computing power, to address large, complex research and humanitarian challenges.  The London Citizen Cyberscience Summit will gather scientists and citizens to learn about the latest breakthroughs in citizen cyberscience. A bold ambition of the summit is to draft a citizen cyberscience manifesto, involving all the stakeholders in the field.

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