#opendev

'Humankind' se abre a la participación de la comunidad de los jugadores

Los jugadores pueden solicitar ahora la oportunidad de participar y dar su opinión en 3 escenarios de juego específicos mientras se prepara el estreno del juego en 2021

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PC Game Show 2020: Humankind – Introducing OpenDev

Amplitude have announced “OpenDev”, a new way for the community to participate in the development of Mankind. Amplitude says community has always been important and that they have worked with the community to create every game so far and they want to keep that going. As such players will have a chance to participate and give feedback in 3 gameplay scenarios as they amp up for the games release…

Across the global development sector, the idea of opening up data and becoming more transparent is taking hold. One might even say that it has become reasonably well established; almost every week, new data portals commissioned by global development organisations are appearing.

Undoubtedly, this move towards transparency and open data is, in theory, a positive development. Responsibly sharing data on global development projects is potentially, a crucial step towards more effective international development projects, both in terms of more efficient development programming on the side of the practitioner, and in terms of increasing accountability for citizens affected by projects.

So surely the flourishing online data portals are a good thing?

Not entirely. While the intentions are undoubtedly good, the results are often much less so.

Take, for example, the new mapping portal from the African Development Bank, Map Africa. To accompany the launch, they produced an explanatory video. Their intentions for MapAfrica are thus made clear, with taglines such as:

If a picture is worth 1000 words... then visualising data helps us better understand.

MapAfrica is interactive: it connects people.

It makes our information available to everyone.

And shows how we are improving Africans' lives.

It empowers citizens to build better lives, and demand accountability.

Now, let's look at the platform.

A map of the world, with a lot of coloured dots in African countries. What do the dots mean? Clicking on one brings up a pop up that looks something like this.

We're starting the wrong way round on this analysis: but why would that information be useful? The 'total funding' figure given doesn't make clear to which organisation the funding is going, so there's no chance of tracking the financial flow. The 'Project Page' link is empty (and I've yet to find a single one), so there's no further information given on the project. There's no contact details given, nor the name of the partner organisation, so if a user wanted to ask a question or report a problem with the project, finding out who to contact - and thus 'demanding accountability' would be difficult, if not impossible.

My question, then: how exactly is this contributing to any of the goals stated above?

I'd suggest that perhaps they're not; at least, not as well as they could be. What it is doing, is making the AfDB's intentions at being a transparent organisation visible. It provides them with something to point at when asked about their transparency and open data policies, and it provides them with their own, easily identifiable and unique portal.

But these are the wrong targets to aim for. Putting data online should be about far more than simply lip service to transparency, and instead focus on how to best make the data useful, and accessible, to the desired target audience.

Tools developers within the global development sector could learn a lot from the civic software movement; many of the guidelines in CivicPatterns are very relevant here, especially those in the Delivery and Engagement sections. For example - build it they won't come, or do your homework - I wonder how often those who are tasked with building a new data portal actually take the time to see what is already out there, and learn from their work. (Incidentally - this is one issue that the Tools section of the Open Development Toolkit site that I work on is trying to address, by bringing them together in one place)

Of course, learning from each other and building upon each others work would be a lot easier were the code for these portals made open source. Currently, very few development data portals actually are - DFID's DevTracker for one, and Development Initiatives' d-portal for another. Public money should be spent towards creating a public infrastructure, not to create proprietary bits of software that can't be reused, aren't maintained, and go quickly out of date.

Again, we could learn a lot from other related movements here - the Poplus project's efforts at building independent pieces of software that can be used and remixed, for example.

Basic software development guidelines aren't being followed: how many tools developers would be able to easily identify their target audience? And let's be clear here: "the public" is not a target audience. Let's be honest, too - the chances of the average citizen in a heavily aid-recipient country ever coming across a development data portal are very low. The potential audience waiting to be tapped here is elsewhere; civil society organisations and journalists with an interest in financial spending in low-income countries, for example. Topic-specific researchers looking into how different initiatives are supported in certain countries. Fellow global development practitioners, looking to join forces. Even citizens of rich countries, wanting to know where their tax money is being spent.

Where is the research on what kinds of information potential target audiences are wanting to find out? Personally, I've yet to see any. Some user testing happens after the development of a new portal - but by then, it's usually too late to change very much. Even earlier than this should come the first consideration: is a data portal what is needed here? Nathaniel Heller of Global Integrity makes some great points here on the topic of building toolboxes - many of which would be relevant considerations for building individual tools, too.

It's official! Today I started working for the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) again, but this time as a consultant through my own company Openhearted AB! I won a public procurement for consultancy services and yesterday was the last day for the other companies who also put in bids to appeal the decision, but it seems like none of them did that, so today I was allowed to work my first day on that contract that will last until end of 2015! It was apparently 433 days since I left my previous position at Sida as their Transparency and Social Media Manager, to go work for the World Bank. A colleague saw in the Intranet that I had been "out-of-office" for 433 days, and this picture is actually from my Instagram feed the day I left! :) 

This position at Sida is only part-time though so I will continue to work in the Open Aid Partnership Secretariat, hosted in the World Bank Innovation Labs in Washington DC, although I will work remotely for them and be based here i Stockholm. I am very lucky that my managers at the World Bank and at Sida see this as a good opportunity for both them and me, as we see that there are possible synergy effects between the two positions, as my areas of expertise within both organizations are international aid transparency and open development data. 

Below you'll find an attempt of a translation of the assignment I will be working on (some words I found difficult to translate, like "omvärldsbevakning" and "kravställan" that were both words in the title...)

Monitoring, communication and setting requirements for increased transparency in international development cooperation

The consultant will work with monitoring international developments in aid transparency and analyze the work to increase access to data and documentation in international development cooperation. The aim is to provide a basis for Swedish priorities and the Swedish work in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Secretariat and to support other countries and international aid organizations work to increase transparency. The work will contribute to the Swedish commitments to transparency in aid. It will be done in close cooperation with other countries and organizations involved in the consortium that constitute the Secretariat, as well as the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Sida transparency manager. The work includes to on behalf of Sida and Sweden provide support and participate in communication activities for other donor countries to pursue and enhance their implementation of the international transparency agenda. In addition, to participate in efforts to spread awareness of IATI and the international transparency work to donors who have not yet implemented transparency efforts according to the IATI standard.