Agree, from across the planet
This super-interesting, Ibrahim! I’m an open data activist myelf, and it’s not everyday I get to engage with fellow datageeks from the Arab world. Thanks a lot for sharing this.
For what it’s worth, I totally agree with you. In Italy the open data community is there. It is very active and enthusiastic, but numerically tiny (about 250 members in the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list, far and away the best watering hole for OD entusiasts, both from the civic hacker and from the civil servant side)… but colleagues in other European countries tell me that this is actually a bigger number than they get in, say, Spain! The interesting thing about the OD community in Italy is that it has come to wield quite a lot of influence. Here you can find the story of this mailing list, and how the OD landscape in Italy changed completely over 18 months.
But that is not the whole story. As open data become fashionable, I am worried we will see an “open data bubble”: governments releasing a lot of data and launching a lot of contests that then saturate and jam the capacity of the few civic hackers who actually do have the ability to do anything useful with the data. The only way out of this is to develop the demand side of OD: basically to teach a lot of people to look for data, download them and re-use them. In Italy people are excited about scraping and visualizations, especially of geodata; so a bunch of people in SOD, myself included, are organizing some data hack tutorials in the Fall, with the idea of bringing people from “never done it” to “I can do something!” in a day.
So, what’s happening in the Emirates? Any hackday coming? Any civil society movements worth noting from your point of observation on the Arab world?