Okolloh on open data

We hear it all too often. Activists from around the world come together at events, like an Open Knowledge Foundation conference in Berlin, to swap stories about how they are pushing their governments to be more transparent.

Many countries also send government officials to talk about their own commitments to open data.

But Kenyan blogger and activist, Ory Okolloh - a noted transparency blogger and speaker, says she worries that all too often, tech people, judiciary figures and the media work in silos - and that as a result, the movement to push governments to make their data more easily accessible is failing to accomplish its goals.

She says security concerns in certain African nations can sometimes thwart efforts on the part of NGOs and large companies to bring Internet-based products many of us take for granted to African nations.

Stop! No maps, please

"One of the issues that some countries had struggled with were local maps," Okolloh says. "When I was policy director in Africa for Google, we had mapping parties in different countries and one of the events was at the university in Addis in Ethiopia. We had never had an issue before. But then these security guys came up to us and said, 'We hear you are doing something around maps and you need to stop. The only people allowed to generate maps are the government.'"

Okolloh says the Ethiopian officials felt Google Maps was ok, in theory, but that they wanted Google to create a system that would allow them to give the final go ahead - to sign off on things that users plotted to maps before the data went live.

"Their issue was citizen involvement in mapping," Okolloh says. "If you know anything about Ethiopia, they are very security conscious, a very closed environment. It's a repressive place were journalists and bloggers are arrested all the time. So anything that has an online component they had a fear around."

The solution was to show Ethiopian officials how little the country was represented on Google in terms of restaurants and physical locations.

Okolloh made the case that not allowing citizens to plot locations freely on maps was hurting the country's businesses and attractiveness as a tourist destination.

"We made the point that they were weakening their own efforts to try to position themselves as one of Africa's fastest-growing economies. I said, look at Nairobi, and then compare what they have to Addis. That comparison was powerful."

Full disclosure…for government

Okolloh explained Google's take-down and review process, and gave government officials a RSS feed so they could see in real time what was being posted.

If they had grievances, they could contact Google to ask that data be removed from Google's search and mapping products.

"The security issue isn't unique to them. We also had issues like this in Israel," Okolloh says. "What was unique here is that the Ethiopians didn't understand that they could have an opportunity to review. We gave them an avenue to raise issues."

By helping Ethiopian officials to understand how the technology works and what the benefits of it are, Okolloh says she was able to achieve a better outcome for Google than "going off and being like 'you people are crazy.'"

But the problem, experts say, is that such situations put Google - a publically traded company, not a data openness NGO - in the awkward position of advocating for openness as means of promoting its own business interests.

…and openness for all?

Since openness might not always align with Google's (or another multinational's) own business strategy, Okolloh is urging data openness people in the tech space to work more closely with their counterparts in the legal and media arena - a process that doesn't always take place organically.

Yet she thinks South Africa may prove a good example of how these collaborations can succeed.

"The city of Johannesburg built an app because they are getting so many complaints on Facebook and Twitter about potholes," says Okolloh. "The app allows you to report a pot hole and take a picture of it. Then, you can actually track the progress in terms of the repair, when it happened. And some of this is them getting feedback on social media and also local hackers and techies have been doing joint events with the municipal government over time. They are getting them to embrace technology, which I think is more sustainable."

She also says that a number of governments in Africa, most notably Kenya, have begun crowdsourcing questions.

"The Kenyan government setup a Google Doc where people could type in questions for the president and submit, and he actually responded to them in parliament."

But Okolloh says that in a time when "supply of government data going online is increasing," the issue of actually following up on the corruption revealed by the data will take the coordinated efforts of various pro-transparency actors in a society. Their goal, Okolloh says, should be to inform citizens of what the data means without drowning them in the numbers.