BEEFS
BEEFS
Obama Leaves Behind New Rules Forcing US Funded Organizations to Share Data
President Barack Obama will be quitting the stage as the Chief of the United States of America while pundits are watching careful whether his successor Donald Trump will fit into the big shoes that Obama started in creating an open government .
Experts have attributed Open Government Data as one major part of Obama ’ s legacy as the 44th President of the most powerful country in the world . During his second term it will be noted that Obama did sign an Executive Order -Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information . At the 4th International Open Data Conference ( IODC ) held in Madrid , Spain a new portal was launched by the US government through its Aid Agency to comply to the executive order made in 2013 .
Through the United States Agency for International Development ( USAID ) a new evaluation policy has been released all organizations expecting or receiving funds are required to ensure they collect data and share it using the new portal dubbed Development Data LIbrary ( DDL ).
Speaking to Chief Data Officer of USAID Brandon Pustejovsky noted that the agency for a long time it was a requirement after completion of every project a report was sent to them “ Historically USAID has only requested reports of the end results in narrative formats pdf documents but we have not historically requested the raw data and underlying those reports ” adding “ What happens at times the member of the public may see a claim made in a report and ask where is the data that substantiates the claim . In order to be good stewards of data and taxpayers funds we want to make sure we can in fact substantiate those claims with the actual data .”
In 2014 USAID did change all its grants , cooperative agreements and its contracts to specify that if you are receiving USAID funding in generating data on international development , you must submit that data to the Development Data Library .
The Development Data Library ( DDL ) Platform is an online repository of datasets made available by Organisations funded solely by the Taxpayers of the US Government . DDL was launched to the International audience during the International Open Data Conference in Madrid . It contains five fiscal years of Data from 44 Countries of the world explains Andie Vaughn a Program Analyst at USAID “ It contains five fiscal years of data you can build up through 44 different countries and you can download it in machine readable format and you can use it ” Adding “ On the Micro Enterprise Results Reporting Portal the goal of the USAID ’ s micro enterprise developments efforts is to broaden access to micro finance access in developing countries .”
According to Scott Thompson Senior Data Scientist at USAID describes the new platform as having an interactive dashboard
12 LIFE TODAY MAGAZINE Issue 1 , No . 001 / 17 / December 2016