Fuelling innovation with open data | The Trinidad Guardian Newspaper

"Trinidad-based software development firm Teleios System recently held its largest and most successful “Code Jam” competition. The contest showcased the remarkable talent and creativity inherent in people, when given the opportunity. Coming in the aftermath of the Caribbean Open Data Conference held earlier this year, the Teleios Code Jam also highlighted the potential economic and social benefits that could be derived if more open data were available to developers and innovators... Sadly, countries in the Caribbean have been slow to join the growing global open data revolution. Some of the main factors hindering greater adoption in the region include: lack of familiarity with the model; lack of evidence of benefits; perceived challenges to ownership, control, and monetisation of data; uncertainty on how to leverage and the reality that there is not yet a critical mass of interested developers...  In addition, as with many governments around the world, the technical challenges of data collection, structuring and dissemination are compounded by another issue: public sector bureaucracy.   Kenya’s Paul Kukobo, chief executive officer of the Kenya ICT Board, in relating the Kenyan experience with open data, summed up the challenge well, stating:  'The whole culture of government is that they are the data originators and data collectors. Sharing internally was a problem in the first place… Technical challenges were not where the headache was—we have plenty of skill and partners here to do that—it was in getting the data in the first place, in the form that we needed it. Plenty of data wasn’t in digital form or usable, and was trapped in agencies.' Still there is much room for hope. Open data initiatives have the potential to change the dynamic between citizens and their governments. If governments publish pubic datasets in open, easy to access formats, people can leverage the datasets to create the applications and services that they want. A notably example is in the healthcare apps generated by the release of open data by the United States Department of Health and Human Services... Still there is much room for hope. Open data initiatives have the potential to change the dynamic between citizens and their governments. If governments publish pubic datasets in open, easy to access formats, people can leverage the datasets to create the applications and services that they want. A notably example is in the healthcare apps generated by the release of open data by the United States Department of Health and Human Services..."