Open Data: The Web Foundation and International Development Research Centre are seeking proposals for “exploring the emerging impacts of open data in the south.” They want research proposals from specified southern countries by Sept. 10 “that address current gaps in the evidence base underlying the implementation of open data initiatives in the developing world, and to inform policy and practice in a range of different settings. Research partners will be invited to form part of an international research network that will be established over the course of 2013.”
“As a result of this call, we expect to issue a series of grants ranging from USD$25,000 to USD$75,000. It is expected that smaller grants will focus on small, single-country or local initiative cases, and larger grants can include a wider range of activities such as multi-country comparisons of open data about a particular governance domain (e.g. budget, cities, extractive industries), technical assistance to on-going initiatives and/or significant engagement with relevant policy dialogues. The duration of each project will not exceed 12 months, with projects expected to start in early 2012.
Conference Summary: The Access to Information Programme has summarized the speeches and the outcomes of the discussions during the conference Advocacy for Access to Information – Achievements and Challenges held June 15-16, 2012, in Sofia, Bulgaria. Leading organizations in the access to information area from 12 countries (Armenia, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Spain, UK) shared achievements and discussed the challenges for the freedom of information advocates.
Innovation Fund: Global Integrity has announced plans to launch an Innovation Fund, offering between $2,000 and $10,000 “to experiment with brand new ways (untested or in the very early stages of testing) of diagnosing and/or mitigating the challenges of corruption, transparency and accountability in governance.”
Job Opening: Global Integrity is looking to hire an “OpenGov Hub Community Manager,” according to an announcement. The OpenGov Hub “is an attempt to physically collocate historically disparate but like-minded communities of practice under a single shared physical workspace in downtown Washington, DC.”
The OpenGov Hub community manager will be “the primary point of contact for all OpenGov Hub tenants as well as the broader OpenGov Hub community in Washington, DC for questions, requests, and support related to the Hub. The successful candidate will have an uncanny ability for herding cats and for generating consensus from of a wide range of opinions and personalities.”
Data Portals Africa: A blog post by the World Resources Institute Access Initiative reviews a report on data portals in Africa and a recent workshop. Among other things, WRI “has developed preliminary templates that list proposed types of data and information that governments should proactively disclose without a formal request, for each natural resource considered in the project (oil, mining, forests, environment, land and water).” Only two countries, Morocco and Kenya, have implemented open government data portals, the report says.
Open Data: Qunb, a new French startup, has published a slideshow listing of the US, UK and French open data portals.
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