10 Ideas for Open Development

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Aid Information Challenge on Friday at the Word Bank. It was a great discussion that brought together a mix of people from different disciplines interested in open data and transparency's capacity to make aid more effective. Thanks again to the World Bank for hosting, and to the Development Gateway for all they did to make it happen.

Below is a summary of a wrap-up session where we asked the group to identify the best ideas coming out of the day. We already have a few folks taking the initiative on some of these, and would welcome others interested to follow up:

• Build a community of developers interested in leveraging development data, similar to what Sunlight Labs has been able to do around open data for the U.S. government.
• Develop a focused pilot that maps projects and activities at a sub-national level, for one country, using open standards. This could be shared as a possible template to be used by other donors at the upcoming IATI conference.
• Develop a FAQ reference that includes the following: what is open data, why is it valuable, and how do you implement it. Provide examples to help persuade decision-makers at donor organizations and elsewhere to release data.
• Develop tools to bridge data collection and dissemination: How can we better connect SMS and other low bandwidth tools with mapping and visualization?
• Conduct a high profile "Apps for Development" challenge to mobilize the tech community to develop value-added tools and services to connect, aggregate, and visualize aid data.
• Get governments in developing countries to pay attention and act on the data to drive aid effectiveness.
• Develop a top 10 list on development data gaps: What should be our biggest priorities?
• Encourage partnerships like the one between Google and the World Bank that bring together owners of data with resources to make it more accessible, understandable, and usable via the web.
• Develop augmented reality applications to give the data context by taking advantage of mobile technologies.
• Engage this community on prioritizing next steps: We have a critical mass of people who are interested in this, let's focus our energies on achieving some concrete results.

For those of you who were not at the event, we'd love your feedback and recommendations. Join our online community of Open Dev'ers if you want to get involved and connect with others: www.opendev.ning.com.