Innovation Tag: Open Data

The Violence Early-Warning System (ViEWS) is a publicly available data-driven forecasting system at the frontier of research that generates monthly predictions of conflict fatalities up to 36 months ahead – throughout Africa and the Middle East. The project launched in 2017 to help policy-makers and practitioners plan anticipatory action and humanitarian interventions with a transparent and evidence-based approach. It is based at Uppsala University and Peace Research Institute Oslo.

With the Quality Tools an organisation can evaluate, monitor and compare the quality and use of its services within and between organisations. The tools include a Self-assessment, Customer Feedback and Utilisation Rate Measurement tool and are free of charge. The tools were developed primarily for public sector organisations to help them develop customer-oriented digital services and improve knowledge-based management. On a national level the tools provide data on the state of digitalisation.

"Why did I fail? How should I develop my career?" To address such concerns, we developed the Digital Mentor Service of National Qualification. It leverages massive data on national qualification tests to identify each individual's weaknesses and why they fail. It also provides personalized information by matching examination history with jobs and training offered by government agencies. Supporting test takers from skills assessment and development to job placement.

Countries in the Western Balkans created digital infrastructure to support transparent business operation and prevent fraud in their Common Regional Market. The official registries from 5 countries in the Western Balkans created a digital platform, connecting all official legal and financial data about companies, connected entities, blocked bank accounts and sanctioned persons, bridging different legislations, languages and currencies. The platform won the 2022 OECD/SIGMA/ReSPA award.

Governments around the world are censoring the Internet, but how can we document, track, and respond to Internet censorship events? In 2022, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) launched the Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT) which hosts one of the largest open datasets on Internet censorship to date. In real-time, new measurements are published from around the world, enabling researchers, journalists, and human rights defenders to track and respond to censorship worldwide.

Digital transformation is a long-term journey that involves complex changes. One of the challenges is how we evaluate the progress. We are inspired by the quote, "If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it". Most of Catalonia's municipalities cannot do a digital assessment. The Digital Maturity Index provides an evaluation turnkey solution for local governments. It is based on open data, and it has a clear focus on public value impact.

Metroverse is an urban economy navigator built at the Growth Lab at Harvard University. It is based on over a decade of research on how economies grow and diversify and offers brand new insights on a city's growth prospects by placing its existing technological capabilities and knowhow at the heart of how diversification unfolds. Metroverse was built using a user-centered design process to help city leaders, policymakers and researchers grapple with 21st-century urbanization challenges.

In COMo, the CO2 concentration (CO2 = Carbon Dioxide) serves as a measure for indoor air quality and aerosol pollution; the latter correlates with the potential (COVID) viral load. Objective CO2 readings via networked sensors enable operators to control the indoor air quality and thus reduce the risk of infection for visitors. Published data allow visitors to make decisions about visiting the facility. All content is available under open source licenses (MIT, BSD, Creative Commons).

The initiative was developed in response to the dispersion of sources for consulting information on the documents produced by the national government. The solution, a data catalog (datalog), generates an institutional memory of open consultation on different aspects that the outgoing government delivers to the incoming one. The tool is innovative in applying machine learning technologies to process, organize and present a large volume of documentary information in an agile and simple way.

The Australian Government - Dept of Finance sponsored a Proof of Concept (PoC) that looked at how Rules as Code (RaC) might be provided as a shared utility that can be used to deliver simpler, personalised digital user journeys for citizens. RaC is the process of taking legislation and regulations and turning them into machine-readable code. It provides many benefits to citizens and government, including greater reuse, less duplication, greater transparency and accessibility of rules.