[Annual Report] Open Data to Shift Power
Returning the power to the people
by Ania Calderon, Nati Carfi, Agustina De Luca, and Cat Cortes
It is easier to digest numbers when they do not come with faces or names, but during this pandemic, we see a return to humanising data. Protests around the world against systemic racism and discrimination have fuelled demands and litigations to access disaggregate data showing the disproportionate impact on vulnerable and marginalised groups.
As stated by a recent report on why data matters, “while data can play a part in breaking racial boundaries, history has shown it can also reinforce them”. Social inequality in all its forms, in the time of a pandemic no less, has felt more cruel and unacceptable. But it is nothing new. The suffering and injustice that has been compounding in minority communities has propelled many of us to demand for dramatic shifts in power.
Working with open data, we are continuously challenged by the need to highlight that people — and not abstract, intangible information — are at the center of our work. These recent rifts in the public sphere have put many of us in the same room, sorting through the disparate impacts of data driven technologies and asking ourselves how opening up data can help shift power and become a tool for social change.
This annual report and the impact stories we share is our pursuit for answers. As the COVID-19 virus was declared a pandemic we were undergoing a strategy refresh, underlying questions and challenges that seem more urgent than ever. Like the rest of the world, we have had to adapt to the times, but our work continues to reinforce the need to embed openness, collaboration and accountability in data systems, while holding fundamental rights and civil liberties in check.
Our new strategy recognises that the open data community has not sufficiently balanced its arguments for publishing information against other fast-evolving data rights and increasingly sophisticated algorithmic technology. It calls for principles of openness to consider both individual and collective data rights, and the need for policies to account for context and mitigate harms. With these overarching norms in hand, we have continued to show how open data can work in practice to bring concrete social and political benefits.
We do this by articulating norms and delivering reforms, focusing on issues which have salience and momentum, such as navigating the impacts of COVID-19, tackling corruption, closing gender pay gaps, and mitigating climate change. We create a positive feedback loop which gathers lessons from effective policy solutions, builds stronger institutional support globally, and broadens the coalition for purpose-driven, balanced access to and use of data.
A Snapshot of Our Progress
Committed to Shifting Power
The world is changing and we change with it. This year we launched our 2020–2021 Strategy, reflecting our belief that the open data community has not sufficiently balanced its arguments for publishing information against other fast-evolving data rights and increasingly sophisticated technology, and that data rights are presently too often placed in opposition when they should be seen as part of the same argument.
To reflect this, we updated our mission to make data open and freely available, while protecting the rights of people and communities. Together with a strategy revision, we also refreshed our branding and redesigned our website to keep up with the ever-evolving visual digital world.
This shift needs to be supported by persuasive narrative that helps us target and reach new audiences. In June, we were delighted to welcome our new Communications Lead. Cat Cortes, originally from the Philippines, joins us from Singapore, where she has led successful fundraising, partnerships and communications campaigns in the social development sector.
We are a small, yet agile team. Partnerships and collaboration are threaded in our work across all our focus areas where we are delivering reforms. From our programmes and field partnerships in data rights and anti corruption, to our work in gender pay gap and climate change, it is through local insights that we are able to advance global action. We work with data practitioners and sector organisations to support reformist governments to implement principles and deliver systemic change.
We have heard data referred to as “the new oil” and most recently “the new CO2” and we are committed to ensuring that policies for this new and under-regulated global resource that is data, empowers, rather than exploits, the people.
This blog entry was excerpted from our Annual Report for the period August 2019-July 2020.
We are grateful for the generous support and resources from our funders that make our work possible, including Luminate, IDRC, World Bank, IADB and CAF.
