icegov2012 proceedings

Increasing Kenyan Open Data Consumption: A Design
Thinking Approach
Leonida N. Mutuku
iHub Research
Bishop Magua Centre, Ngong Road
P.O. Box 58275 – 00200 Nairobi
+254 732792987
leo@ihub.co.ke
ABSTRACT
In July 2011, the Kenyan Government became the twenty-second
government worldwide and the second in Africa to release many
of its data sets in an open and reusable format on the Open Kenya
portal. This open data portal has presented great opportunities to
develop applications, especially on the mobile platform. There
have been, however, challenges in engaging the technical and
industry experts in conversations around the open data. We are
conducting an ethnographic study on an experiment that brings
together subject matter experts in the Water, Education,
Transport, and Local County sectors, together with open data
evangelists and software developers to guide them through a
design thinking approach to identifying, idea-ting, and
prototyping open data applications. The main objective of this
study is to identify best practices in increasing open data
consumption through scalable mass appeal mobilization and civic
engagement tools and applications.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
A.1 [General Literature]: General – Conference Proceedings
General Terms
Documentation, Design
Keywords
Kenya, Open Data, Design Thinking, Ethnography
1. INTRODUCTION
Over the past couple of years, various governments and public
institutions have launched numerous initiatives to make their data
sets open. Open data is data that is freely accessible, easily
redistributed and reused [8]. The US Government and the World
Bank were among the first of these institutions to release, in 2009,
numerous data sets in an open format for access by all.
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
18
Jessica Colaco
iHub Research
Bishop Magua Centre, Ngong Road
P.O. Box 58275 – 00200 Nairobi
+254 735203733
jessica@ihub.co.ke
Since then, we have seen more than 20 governments and other
major institutions around the world release their data, in a bid to
democratize this public information by making it accessible to all
citizens; and to promote innovation of local solutions to socioeconomic
development issues that afflict the respective countries
[13]. By providing this public information to citizens, the
governments empower them to query this data and in this way
promote accountability, transparency and innovation in service
delivery.
2. THE KENYA OPEN DATA INITIATIVE
In July 2011, the Kenyan Government became the twenty-second
country worldwide and the second in Africa [16] to release many
of its data sets in an open and reusable format on the Open Kenya
[13] portal. The Vision given for this initiative is that “with the
launch of Open Kenya, Africa will have its own story of
promoting transparency through open data to celebrate, learn from
and share” [13]. At the launch of the portal, there were over 400
data sets released to the public in easily manipulated formats.
2.1 Potential of the Open Data Initiative
The Kenya Open Data Initiative enables Kenyans to interact with
government data at different levels and use this information to
engage [11] further with the government in accordance with the
new Constitution’s provisions on access to information [14]. The
government has released many more large data sets since the
launch of the portal, ranging from national census data to statistics
on government spending at national and county level [9].
Various opportunities to develop applications that use the newly
available open data as a basis to represent information have
emerged. Over 90 dataset requests surfaced within the first month
of the launch by developers and other stakeholders, which
indicates a great interest to explore this data in meaningful ways
and represent it visually, while providing useful insights into the
information that lies within this data.
This opportunity could be explored further in the mobile space to
create mobile open data applications. With over 99% of users that
access Internet in Kenya doing so through their mobile phones,
[4] a much faster and more efficient tool to disseminate open data
information to citizens may be through mobiles. It is therefore
worth considering mobile applications as an important
dissemination method of open data information [9].