Re: Workshop on Open Data Readiness Assessment

From: Dhiruj Rambaran <dhiruj_at_shoponline.mu>
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2015 00:02:45 +0400

I think today's meeting, quite clearly (and surprisingly in fact),
demonstrated that 'open data' cannot be implemented at this time. There
are major fundamental steps to carry out first.

These steps include a deep data analysis, far deeper than what one may
even expect (from the information I've gathered today), at the level of
each and every ministry, parastatal, institution and organisation.

In addition to this, I think a fundamental, more important issue, has
now surfaced. After this meeting it has come to my attention that the
quality of the proposed data outputted as "open data" may not
necessarily be of good accurate use to anyone at all! There is a basic
saying in the 'data world' which says... "crap in .. crap out".

I will write up a step-by-step implementation of how govt should proceed
in this endeavour, first ensuring we have good, clean, standardised data
(yes it is more than possible to do so... not complicated at all),
giving the entire country, good and reliable "open data" and, at the
same time, raising us to a minimum of the world bank's "4-stars".

But this is not all.

Another fundamental has been highlighted in this meeting to which (i
believe) represents a far more deeper and serious issue than "just the
provision of 'open data'". Indeed, as one World Bank representative
pointed out.. "this was not even in our list of fundamentals until,
after having met the Mauritian public sector, we have now included this.
We didn't even realise this was an issue until coming to Mauritius".
They were speaking of no data interchange between the mauritian
ministries themselves! In other words, to put it simply, Mauritius has
no interactive government !!! Everyone does and repeats, what everyone
else does and repeats, with each coming up with their own solutions, own
implementations, own definitions, our government is completely
disjointed! In other words, for all this time, we've never had a
functional institution known as "Government".

To me, as a Mauritian, this has to be the worse and biggest
embarrassment I've ever heard. In our case it's never been a question of
learning to walk before we can run... but rather learning to crawl
before we can walk.

Forget the running for now.


Dhiruj



On 08/06/2015 22:19, S Moonesamy wrote:
> Hi Logan,
> At 10:24 08-06-2015, Loganaden Velvindron wrote:
>> I would like to know concretely what is going to be done to make "Open
>> data" a reality. What are the next milestones that are going to be
>> set ?
>
> Today's meeting was about awareness as there are people who are new to
> Open Data. The World Bank will have meetings with focused groups and
> submit a report after that. I don't think that there will be any
> milestones to make Open Data a reality in the short term.
>
> Regards,
> S. Moonesamy
>
>
Received on Mon Jun 08 2015 - 20:03:07 PST