Post by Roza Vasileva (2016 Cohort)
On October 1-3, 2018, I had the pleasure to participate in the first National Open Data Symposium in Omanas a speaker on principles and benefits of Open Data. The presentation covered various definitions of open data, including examples in some key sectors such as health, education, transport, etc.
I was pleased to see representatives from five different sectors across government and private sector together, having a discussion, raising challenging questions. There are many agencies within the government, which have started publishing open data, and these efforts are a bit uneven. I think the most important thing about the symposium was that these agencies came together to start moving towards a collaborative approach to open data. This event sent a powerful message to the public, government and even international open data community that Oman strives to advance their open data agenda and has desire to bring best international practices in this process.
Being one of the international speakers in the event and having worked with the World Bank on open data in many countries, it means to me that Oman is really keen to learn from other international experiences and adopt best global practices in their approach to do open data and moving towards smarter future. We need to remember that we’re increasingly living in cities, and Open Data is key to creating a platform for smart cities. Citizen-focused smart cities increasingly use data analytics to improve service delivery to its citizens making them more accessible, engage with the communities, find joint solutions to most pressing urban issues, making our cities more livable and sustainable. As my own area of academic research lies in looking how open data can support smart cities, I want to see Oman open data use it for open urban innovations and delivering better services to its people.
Conversations evolved around how to make data more usable for the data users. Engagement with the consumers of the data was one of the key points that was raised throughout the symposium. I echo one of the participants comments that value of releasing open data comes from data use. One of the key elements to open data is adopting open license that explicitly gives permission to use and re-use data for any purpose, including commercial purposes. If the license does not exist on the portal and does not articulate those rights for data re-use, the users cannot be sure that they can use the data. This is one of the challenges Oman will need to address to enable the open data benefits, especially for economic growth that were extensively discussed at the Symposium.
-originally posted on Roza’s blog