This page at http://www.kabissa.org/open indicates our interest in joining the growing Open Data movement and provides a standard, easy to find entry point to understanding data that is openly available here.
SlashOpen (/open) is a new idea to encourage more organizations going Open Data to create /open pages - to join in, take a look at http://slashopen.net or mention @slashopen on twitter.
Please add a comment below or contact Tobias Eigen if you are concerned/have an opinion, are interested in helping Kabissa go Open Data, want to use our data, or are otherwise interested in helping define the data we make available.
Making Kabissa Data Open: A Proposal
Currently, Kabissa data is in fact not open, and we will decide whether or not to go open at a board meeting in August 2011.
In order to access and use the data in the Kabissa contact directory now, you need to visit our website and either browse the map or do a database search. Unless of course you happen to already have the direct URL to an organization profile page (e.g. http://visafrica.kabissa.org) or come across it via an Internet search.
Open Data presents an opportunity for Kabissa organizations to be found in many more places. Some examples might include:
- maps or visualizations produced on sites like AidData.org
- local civil society platforms like Nani Online in Kenya, created by organizations seeking to connect around common concerns or issues
- print directories produced by organizations working in local communities, with specific networks, or organizing conferences.
To be clear, we are not talking here about personal details of individuals or email addresses - we are talking about the key organizational details that we all need to share as widely as possible and are always looking for about each other. On Kabissa, this information is managed by the organizations themselves. Individual organizations will be able to opt out of having their information shared via Open Data. The pieces of information we are considering sharing are listed below.
How open is Open Data?
"Open Data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone". (Source: Open Data Manual) This means that it is machine readable (e.g. in downloadable XML or CSV files) and there are no technical barriers to accessing it (e.g. it is not locked behind a password or request forms).
Information we would make available would be shared under the same Creative Commons license as the rest of our content on kabissa.org, which means that it is free to use but that Kabissa must be attributed.
What would Kabissa Open Data look like?
On the technical level, going Open Data is trivial. Our site is powered by Drupal and CiviCRM, two integrated open source platforms. We can use Drupal Views (see screenshot) to expose any number of data, filterable by various criteria, in a machine readable format.
We could also consider doing a larger "CiviCRM open API project" to create a CiviCRM plugin that would provide user-friendly interfaces on the backend for exposing contact data via an open API, or a dashboard on the frontend that lets users create their own views based on personalized filters (e.g. by country or thematic area or keyword) which then would provide options for downloading data in XML or CSV.
At the Open Data for Development Camp in May 2011, volunteer programmers succeeded in creating an Application Programmer Interface (API) that allows a download of Kabissa organization directory data in CSV or XML format suitable for manipulation in a spreadsheet program or mashing up with other data and maps.
Which Organization Details would be shared?
We are considering sharing the information that our members already provide about their organizations on their public profile pages. This includes the following:
- Organization Name
- Acronym/Shortname
- Official Website URL (if any)
- Kabissa Profile URL (eg http://visafrica.kabissa.org if shortname is visafrica)
- Mailing Address(es) and phone number(s)
- Mission Statement
- Description of Organization's Activities
- Keywords (if any)
- Organizational focus
- Region(s) of Africa where they work
- Geographical scope
- Size of organization
- Sign Up Date
- Last Updated Date
- Contact ID (a unique number in our system)
We are currently upgrading our platform and will be adding the following information as well which we also would share via Open Data:
- Official registration number(s) in country of registration
- RSS Feed(s)
- Flickr
- YouTube
Other info that would be possible to expose but that we should probably not provide as Open Data - though we could potentially build functionality to share it on an opt-in basis to organizations that want to use Kabissa for building and strengthening their networks:
- Contacts (site users) related to specific organization
- Organizations related to specific contacts
- Organizations related to other organizations (e.g. networks or partnerships)
Beyond the contact database, we could also consider opening up content that members are posting to the site:
- Blog posts by organization
- Blog posts in a country
- etc
Who will use it?
We are still gathering use cases (stories) showing how the data will be used if we release it as Open Data. If you want to use it, please add your story to the comments below or contact us.
Some possible use cases:
- A group of students in the United States is interested in visiting Youth organizations in Uganda. They download a CSV file of organizations working in Uganda on Youth which they can then import to Excel for reviewing offline at their leisure and make their plans. Later they could display these on a map on their own website.
- An organization is putting on a conference on Education in Africa. The organizers download a CSV of Kabissa members working in Education and use it to create a print directory to be distributed at the conference.
- AidData (http://www.aiddata.org) aggregates information from multiple sources to provide a searchable database of global aid flows and projects. The entire Kabissa Organization Database is added as a dataset in XML format that can be searched on that platform, layered on maps and combined with other data to learn about what is being done by whom in Africa.
Can I have a Kabissa profile for my organization without my data being shared?
It is technically possible to provide an option to opt-out of Open Data. However whether we provide it is an open question - we welcome your thoughts on it. Ideally we'd like to share all organization data (excluding email addresses and personal details of individuals). The assumption is that organizations with profiles on Kabissa want to have their information spread as widely as possible, and will want to return to keep their details up to date so that their organization is well represented on the Internet and in all the places their Kabissa data will end up.