Re: Open Data awareness in Mauritius

From: S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com>
Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 10:46:31 -0700

Hi Ish,
At 03:16 26-05-2015, Ish Sookun wrote:
>Last night I sent an email to the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce and
>Industry (MCCI) asking about their support for open data. I inquired
>about the facts and figures I saw on the website[1].

Did you get a reply from the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce and Industry?


>On the "trade tools" page[2] it is mentioned that import & export
>figures are available through Excel figures. Microsoft Excel is a
>proprietary software that reads spreadsheets.

I tried the "export to Excel" and I received a zero-byte file. The
information was displayed when I used the "print" feature.

>On the openAfrica[3] website, under datasets for Mauritius, I found
>the resource file is downloadable as a CSV. It is also provided
>under Open Data Commons Attribution License[4].

The data I found on openAfrica was dated 2013.

>Coming back to the Excel file provided by MCCI, the following line
>from the disclaimer[5] makes it unclear to me if I can freely use
>the information from the Excel sheet.
>
>"All the rights in the Information, including but without limiting
>the generality of the foregoing, and all intellectual property
>rights, belong solely to MCCI."

The question of rights is more complicated than it seems. I prefer
not to comment about the above as I do not know the answer for the above case.

>There has not been a proper awareness by the Government, NGOs or the
>private sector to educate the population about Open Data.

I am not aware of any non-governmental organisation in Mauritius
interested in Open Data. I don't know whether the private sector is
interested in Open Data. It is not up to the Mauritius Internet
Users to educate the population about Open Data. I don't think that
it is up to the Government to educate the population about Open
Data. It is better if the government focuses on Open Government Data.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy
Received on Tue May 26 2015 - 17:46:59 PST