“We’re going to need more and better data to measure and track progress against global climate change targets, including information on temperature changes, mapping deforestation and biodiversity in real time and cataloguing changes to flood plains as oceans rise. Making this data open by design could be the secret ingredient that accelerates progress.”
Tag: Policy
Leading science groups urge global accord on Open Data in a Big Data World
A group of four major international science organisations – including ISSC – have today called for global endorsement of an accord to help assure open access to volumes of “big data” that increasingly are the basis of research and policy-making.
What are the impacts of non-open licenses?
The ODI explains why the decision about which license to use is one of the most important steps in publishing a dataset.
Rapid, Climate-Informed Development Needed to Keep Climate Change from Pushing More than 100 Million People into Poverty by 2030
“A new World Bank report shows that climate change is an acute threat to poorer people across the world, with the power to push more than 100 million people back into poverty over the next fifteen years. And the poorest regions of the world – Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia – will be hit the hardest.”
More voices mean smarter cities
Creating mechanisms for participation in urban planning can be as traditional as institutionalizing town meetings on zoning issues or as innovative as deploying digital platforms for community mapping. For instance, a number of initiatives, such as the Open Cities Project, illustrate the ways in which citizens can help contribute information to the policymaking process.
Open Cities draws on inputs from a range of groups to “create usable information through community mapping techniques, to build applications and tools that inform decision making, and to develop the networks of trust and social capital necessary for these efforts to become sustainable.” The project informs World Bank investment planning on addressing urban challenges and disaster risk in pilot cities in South Asia.
Want a ‘Data Revolution’? Then listen to what citizens really want
“Why are the #OpenData and #CivicTech movements repeating all the old mistakes about top-down development? That was the major question tackled at a community skills day during the African Open Data Conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, between September 2-5…”