Having created models for open-sourcing and crowd-sourcing, the bank is now moving toward mash-ups. A new Mapping for Results program offers interactive maps pinpointing locations of almost 3,000 bank projects in more than 16,000 places worldwide. Links open up pages with information about each project, and users can add overlays that show, say, where infant mortality is highest to see whether the bank’s work in those areas matches the need.

The program is sensitive because it involves releasing data provided by client governments and others, but the hope is that it will prompt these parties to link their own data on economic and social development to the site or otherwise make it available.

THE Swedish government, a big public supporter of development projects, has followed suit with a prototype, a Web site with information about where it spends its aid money and the impact its spending has had. “The goal is to achieve as effective poverty reduction as possible,” the Swedish government said this year in announcing the effort. “To achieve this goal, development cooperation must be opened up to transparency and ideas from others.”

Next week, Kenya, too, will open a Web site giving access to data that, until now, has existed largely in books on the shelves of various ministries. Software developers are already playing with it — seeking patterns like whether there is any correlation between the government’s spending on schools and students’ test scores, literacy and matriculation.

“The World Bank has made it easier with what it is doing with open data,” says Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s permanent secretary for information.

The broader release of such data will enable more “scientific” policy-making, cut down on corruption in Kenya and engage more people in government by empowering them with knowledge they can use to challenge political leaders, he says.

Asked if there would be resistance to public dissemination of government data, Dr. Ndemo said transparency was inevitable.

Information is valuable, he says, and people will find a way to get it: “This is one of those things, like mobile phones and the Internet, that you cannot control.”