The objective of the project is to revive the Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI) that was originally started in 2010/2011 but not developed since 2015. The aim of the project is to restart GODI and bootstrap a series of activities to put in place a critical mass of actors for the initiative to develop gracefully over years.
The complete requirements for were diverse, including development of specific policy guidance which could be enacted in legislation, through to capacity building at all levels of government, and development and delivery of an open data portal.
On the infrastructure side, there were three key elements:
- The OD policy: the policy is the core element of an Open Data initiative as it creates a legal foundation and obligations for agencies to publish Open Data sets following open data principles,
- The OD portal: the open data portal is the most visible element of the initiative as the place where all users, governmental or not, go to find and exploit datasets,
- The OD Community: the OD community is a less concrete element, but its development is critical for the take-off of OD and for the emergence of impact. It consists of a series of activities such as meetings, hackathon, etc. as well as an online portal to gather news, opportunities, to support dialog between members and to ease government/non-governmental stakeholders interactions.
Whythawk’s specific engagement was for capacity building and delivery of the portal. The overall project was managed and delivered by long-term collaborators, SBC4D.
Our solution
This was a long-term project requiring in-country consulting and support over an eight-month period.
The development of the portal was executed in three steps:
- An initial audit of the existing site to assess whether we would upgrade or replace the current production server. We decided on replacement.
- A first roll-out of the new portal. As soon as the audit was completed worked towards delivering a portal following international standards and running the latest secure version of DKAN.
- A second roll-out was completed after all new features are integrated. New features were related to the Open Data policy and ensured that policy statements were enforced by the portal.
Capacity building was one of the core elements of the project. Based on the stakeholders’ meetings during our first field visit, we identified five types of sessions that would be organised, of which Whythawk delivered four:
- Portal management training: This session was for the OD portal team and the system engineer.
- Change management training: This session was for high-level management of agencies like Chief Director, permanent secretary, directors general. The aim of this session was explain the benefits of Open Data and the overall impact on the way the administration works. This type of session is critical to ensure buy-in at the highest level, and to ensure that a consistent message is sent to all levels of the administration.
- Data management training: Data management skills are the most important skills to support GODI. It targets data managers within agencies. Not only would it help staff cleaning and curating data for publication, but it would also give them skills to exploit published datasets, increasing the government-internal data sharing, and providing incentives and understanding for high-quality data publication.
- Data publication training: Data publication training targets IT service of agencies and helps them acquire skills to publish and harvest data, using either the portal user interface or the API.
In all, forty days of teaching were delivered.
Outcomes
We delivered our capacity building program to well-attended events, and to people with extensive technical and management skills for delivery. We also handed over management of the new portal to the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) in 2019.
