Category: Open Data

Member of Nandi statistics team looks at a screen displaying the Data Desk back-end

We’ve officially handed over the Nandi Data Desk!

After the successful launch of the Nandi Data Desk, we were back at it, working together with Nandi’s county leaders to prepare their data for public view. Through our engagement, the team from Nandi were well trained to manage the system. With the simple accessible web application, the Nandi data desk provides a responsive and seamless data upload process. The engagements culminated in the successful handing over of the system to the technical team, who are well equipped to manage the County Data Desk.

Nandi officially launches the County Data Desk

Nandi County’s Data Desk was officially launched on 5th May 2022 amidst pomp and glamour at the County headquarters in Kapsabet, making it the second county to establish the facility that collects, curates, analyzes and publishes relevant county data, in line with their commitments to the Open Government Partnership.

Check your bias! Components of effective citizen engagement

How do biases affect how we interact with others? We explored this question during our recent Data Leaders Fellowship workshop where we looked at citizen engagement as an interactive two way process that encourages participation, exchange of ideas and flow of conversation. An effective citizen feedback framework considers trust, participation, language, context and bias as components that work together to ensure that the maximum level of engagement is achieved.

Great things happen when we come together

We recently held the second data leaders fellowship programme workshop on 29th September 2021 at the Lake Naivasha Country Club. It was great to interact with all the data fellows we have been working closely with throughout this programme. Read on to find out more about how it went.

Phone screen showing WhatsApp app

WhatsApp’s new Terms & Conditions: What they mean to us

Eight years after it gained popularity in Kenya, WhatsApp is now not only owned by Facebook but has more features added to it making it more appealing for masses and increasing its penetration in most countries worldwide. With the new ownership came new terms and conditions in 2012 which most users agreed to without reading. A new set of terms and conditions were unveiled by the company early this year which caused quite a stir online. Data protection experts, governments and civil societies went up in arms with the new terms and the extent in which individual and business data is collected from the platform.
At the Open Institute, we convened an informal lunch time chat to discuss the new terms and conditions and to try and explain what the impact of them would be to the everyday citizen.