Challenges Holding Back Open Data In Nonprofits

Public discourse around the many applications of big data has generally revolved around its uses in the private sector, whether this be to better advertise to consumers or increasing operational efficiency. However, there is one area that has hitherto been neglected, and it’s an area with the potential to do substantial social good – the nonprofit sector.

In recent years, nonprofits have made great strides towards collecting and exploiting data, finding ever more innovative ways to help solve some of the worlds oldest problems. However, impactful data projects are not cheap. In order to join the big data revolution that has proven so beneficial in other areas, many nonprofits rely on open data. Fortunately, there is also motivation to share such data.

One nonprofit leading the way in open data is the World Bank. We spoke to Eric Anderson, a senior disaster risk manager and ICT specialist with the World Bank, about how open data was helping the organization bring relief to millions and help achieve its ultimate goal of ending world poverty.

How important is open data for disaster management?

Oh, super important! One of the biggest challenges during an emergency is that you simply don’t have the time to clean up, organize, and begin the data discovery process. Having the data already open means it’s more user-friendly – easier to discover, easier to access, and easier to use and reuse. This means you don’t have to worry about issues regarding licensing or permissions. So I think open data as a philosophy and as a standard has really helped accelerate that data problem during emergencies.

Have you seen more organizations making their data open in recent years? Is there more that people could be doing?

In international development, I think recognition has increased that the underlying data of risk assessments, damage maps, and other products like this which deal with a lot of data, should, as much as possible, be made open. I think the World Bank, certainly many UN agencies, and governments are beginning to treat these input datasets as public goods themselves. It is a little bit of a tricky situation because many of these datasets are expensive to collect and maintain and there’s a lot of data gaps. So I think one area that needs improvement is making government data available openly where it has a humanitarian case.

I think that’s really the forefront of the challenge – figuring out the business model for maintaining datasets. On one hand, there’s a good case that some datasets should be viewed as public goods that should be freely and openly available. But on the other hand, someone has to pay to collect and to maintain it.

You find it with mapping data in particular elevation models or constant time series data, like weather data.