Ghana participates in World Bank’s Open Data confab in US

The Director-General of the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) of Ghana has participated in a two-day International Open Data Conference hosted by the World Bank and the United State Government from 10-12 July 2012.

The conference brought together managers of Open data initiatives from across the world to review the progress being made on Open Data.

Mr William Tevie, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, said Ghana was invited for the conference as a result of its work on the Ghana Open Data initiative (GODI).

He said the GODI if implemented would make government more transparent, improve efficiency and spark off innovation from the demand side for applications to be developed to better serve the citizenry.

He said Ghana currently had an alpha version of the portal and was working to put up datasets for applications to be developed for the November launch of the Beta version of the Ghana Open Data Portal currently available on the website.

“The GODI project will make government data widely available and will become a good source of championing the public voice on governance,” he added.

He announced that as part of the project a new component has been added called the Open Data Journalism to focus on training media leaders and journalists on how to use open data in their reporting.

Mr Tevie said the training workshop Journalists would be organized in collaboration with the World Bank Institute and some international NGOs who were championing open data initiative expected to take off in October.

He said Ghana was selected together with Rwanda to rollout the Open Government platform which has been developed as a collaborative platform by the United States and India.

Mr Tevie said he visited the White House at the invitation of Mr Todd Park, the Federal Chief Technology Officer of the United States and accompanied by Eric Akumiah, Director of Operations at NITA and Edwin Opare, Technical lead for the Initiative to review progress made by Ghana on the initiative.

Source: GNA