GODI stands for Ghana Open Data Initiative. It is a portal populated with raw data ranging from Census data, Election data, Health data, Education data, Agricultural data, Telco Quality of Service data, Procurement data, Budget data and many more.
GODI was launched today at the Accra International Conference Centrer during the 2nd General Meeting of the Information Technology Association of Ghana (ITAG) with the Ministry of Communications and the National Information Technology Agency (NITA).
The portal on its own is a collection of datasets with very little extensions to them. To make them meaningful, the portal will require the IT community and others to take advantage to build tools, platforms and applications around them. The portal currently has 112 raw datasets.
The portal will allow the ordinary user to find loopholes in the various government agencies that have provided data. Once information is available a lot can be achieved including transperency and accountability in most agencies.
We can now collectively question the basis of certain government decisions based on open information available. Citizens will soon take part in good and demand driven governance. Whiles this is good for the research communities, planning and policy making, without community interest in the datasets, the portal will not be able to grow to achieve these results.
It is also good to note that, this will open up new avenue for entrepreneurs to take advantage of. With the right skills, entrepreneurs, and other agencies can take advantage to build value added services to make money.
GODI is a good idea with the current goal for the next 2 years to create information out of the data with the help of the developer and research community. Can we however trust the government agencies to:
- Provide accurate data in a timely manner?
- Provide data at all?
- Provide relevant data?
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