Gold mining poisoned thousands (Image: Marcus Bleasdale/VII)

Editorial: “Don’t let internet firms hoard the wealth of big data“

IT WAS the children who were hit hardest. Some 400 died of lead poisoning, and thousands more became sick when gold mining operations ran amok near the village of Bagega in Nigeria in 2010. Two years later, the survivors were still waiting for life-saving treatment because government funds to clean up the area never materialised.

Then local non-profit organisation Follow The Money swung into action. It launched a social media campaign featuring government data on the disaster that showed exactly where the money should have gone. A global media outcry ensued, and in January this year the government finally released $5.3 million dollars to alleviate the crisis.


This is the open data movement in action – helping people to call their leaders to account.

Rich countries lead the world in open data initiatives (see “Kick the data secrecy habit and everyone wins“). In the US and UK in particular, government-run websites can be used as forums for citizens to access figures on crime, health and transport, or comment directly on everything from pending legislation to broken streetlights.

The stakes are much higher in the developing world, where infrastructure is often fragile and checks on institutional power and corruption aren’t always robust. So says Loren Treisman of The Indigo Trust, a London-based non-profit involved with Follow The Money. So where government agencies have failed to publicise available data, non-profits are stepping in. “People are seeing the power of holding the government to account,” she told New Scientist at the first annual Open Data Initiative summit in London last month.

In South Africa, an organisation called the Parliamentary Monitoring Group is using open source software developed by UK open data charity MySociety to launch a website that helps citizens familiarise themselves with their local politicians in advance of next year’s national elections. The site will present information about candidates and locate each user’s nearest official and their office, so they can give feedback. The site will be designed to work well on cellphones, one of the main ways that African users access the internet.

MySociety’s software has now been modified to work in a number of African nations, including Ghana, where a website called Odekro has been launched to let citizens monitor their politicians’ behaviour and provide online access to public records. In Nigeria, meanwhile, a website called Budgit forced the government to backtrack over its controversial decision to remove fuel subsidies, which caused massive riots across the country last year. Using official data, Budgit created easy-to-understand infographics to illustrate exactly how much money the government was wasting every year. The anger it created forced the government to make some big concessions, notably 25 per cent cuts in the salaries of several high-ranking officials.

Budgit has forced Nigeria’s government to backtrack over its decision to remove fuel subsidies

The movement has also spread beyond Africa. Transparent Chennai is an Indian NGO in the city of the same name that uses government data to empower poor residents who usually get overlooked – particularly when it comes to town planning. Local citizen groups take available information on water supplies and public toilets, for example, and update it to show where more facilities are needed. This can form the basis of campaigns for improvement.

The non-profit World Wide Web Foundation is leading a two-year project to examine the impact of the open data movement. It released a report on 31 October that assessed the varying degrees to which countries make their data accessible to the public.

While the report shows the developing world still lags behind the West, the difference such data can make in terms of accountability and transparency there cannot be overstated, says its author Tim Davies. In Sierra Leone, Uganda, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others, open data projects are already paying dividends.

And it’s not just the public who will benefit. Emmanuel Okyere, a software developer at Odekro, says that governments like his in Ghana need to embrace the opportunities that open data create. “A tremendous potential exists to leapfrog countries in the West by learning from mistakes those countries have made.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Power at their fingertips”