open

business

Jessi Baker (Project Provenance) delivers her talk 'Telling stories: products and their data', as part of the "Show me the future of... open data and food" research afternoon. Jessie discusses voluntary supply chain transparency, how this can affect brand and how a product is perceived by consumers. 

The open data and food research afternoon was part of the "Show me the future of" series that focuses on the potential impact of open data on different established industries. #odifutures

Consumers are demanding to know more and more about the food they eat and where it comes from. Open data is answering some of these demands by allowing people and companies to track supply chains, make better agricultural decisions and healthier food choices.

Jessi Baker - Show me the future of.... food and open data

Open Data - Jebelean Ovidiu & Nicole Roberts

CityBridge and Wheatley Education Campus in Washington D.C.

Catching the bus in Nairobi can be a frustrating experience. For many people, it involves jumping aboard a matatu — one of the privately run, 14-seater buses that thread the streets of Kenya’s capital. But the government has little oversight of the matatus: since public transport was privatised in the 1980s, they have been poorly regulated and now vary wildly in quality. 

Now, however, a project seeks to bring order to the chaos of Nairobi’s streets. Digital Matatus, a research collaboration between the University of Nairobi, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University in the United States, uses a range of data sources to make sense of the city’s transport system. 

The team has been working with computer science students, tech companies and volunteers to map matatu routes using smartphones, mobile routing apps, satellite positioning and location- linked transport schedules. Its data-driven maps, showing Nairobi’s 130-plus matatu routes for the first time, are freely available to the public. Commuters can now navigate their city more easily and securely, and policymakers can visualise Nairobi’s transport network more clearly, thus improving urban planning.

The next step is to take the project to other places. “If we can have several other cities create data and use it to make decisions, we would be thrilled,” Sarah Williams, professor of urban studies at MIT and the project’s co-leader, explains in this audio interview. “I would love to […] start a trend where informal transit is visualised for everyone.”

http://www.scidev.net/global/transport/multimedia/project-maps-kenyan-buses-smartphones-cities.html

Project maps Kenyan buses with smartphones

When all around you seems to be going "open", what should you know and bear in mind to avoid a privacy debacle. Unless your data is solely about inanimate objects, there will be privacy considerations for your business or organisation. 

Done properly, suitable consideration may be trivial; done badly, it can be catastrophic, and hindsight is always better when the stories are about a different organisation.

With kittens and hopefully some humour, Sam Smith of Privacy International covers how your organisation can avoid a future audience laughing (uncomfortably) at the privacy choices you should have made for your users, your customers and citizens.

ODI Fridays: Business considerations for privacy and open data: how not to get caught out

SciDev.Net podcasts look at key global development issues and the ways in which science can have a positive impact on equitable and sustainable development and poverty reduction. 