On 22 December 2011, ICT4Peace’s Daniel Stauffacher adressed over 60 Swiss Parliamentarians, Senior Government Officials and ICT Business Representatives in Bern Switzerland at a dinner organised by the pro Open Government Data Parliamentary Group called “Digitale Nachhaltigkeit”, on the potential of Open Government Data for Crisis Information Management and Aid efficiency.

In his presentation he referred to important recent initiatives such as Open Government Partnership (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/) of 8 founding countries lead by Bresil and the United States and 43 additional countries. The Open Government Partnership is a new multilateral initiative launched on 20 September 2011 that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, OGP is overseen by a steering committee of governments and civil society organizations.

He then introduced a series of interesting open data initiatives that aim to foster transparency and efficiency in crisis management and development cooperation, inter alia such as Open Aid Partnership (http://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/open-aid-partnership), The International Aid Transparency Initiative (http://www.aidtransparency.net/), OpenAid.SIDA, Schweden (http://www.openaid.se/en), Open Aid Data (http://open.aiddata.org/), Humanitarian Response – Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets Registry (http://cod.humanitarianresponse.info/), Open Data For Resilience Intiative (OpenDRI) (http://gfdrr.org/gfdrr/opendri), Google Public Data (http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory).

Daniel Stauffacher’s conclusion was that open data can substantially support better crisis information management and development cooperation, for instance in helping implementing the Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets Registry (http://cod.humanitarianresponse.info/). But in addition, he predicted that open government data and open data initiatives, combined with or leveraged by crisis mapping and crowd sourcing can even further enhance aid efficiency and transparency and humanitarian operations. A point that was eloquently also made by Caroline Anstey, a managing director of the World Bank in a recent op-ed in the International Harald Tribune in January 2011 (http://nyti.ms/w13s25).

Daniel Stauffacher’s presentation (in german language) can be found as a PDF here.
The Video presentation (in german language) can be found also here.