The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good morning. I would like to welcome you to this workshop and the subject matter is Internet Governance and Open Government Data initiatives. We have very little time left, but we will do our best to engage all of you and get as much input as we can. The session is going to be structured roughly the following. We are going to get a welcome statement, a statement of commitment to the subject, and then thereafter, we will get brief presentation, you know, two presentations are planned and after that there will be a panel set of discussions. So with that, I would like to invite Madame Hiying Wu. To make a statement.
>> HAIYING WU: Thank you. Distinguished Dr. Nii, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It is my great honor to be the Co‑Chair of this workshop. On behalf of China Association for Science and Technology. I would like to extend my sincere thanks for this workshop. I would also like to extend my special thanks for partner Ghana for your support and cooperation which makes this workshop happen. Especially I appreciate the presence of the participants in this room. Thank you for coming and I hope you can make more friends and have and pleasant discussion in this workshop. This is a governmental organization of scientists and engineers in China. It has 204 national societies and many local branches in provinces, cities, universities and companies within China. It serves a bridge that links Chinese Government to the science communities in China are 600 million Internet users in China.
Chinese Government is now launching Internet Action Plan such as Internet plus education, Internet plus healthcare, CAST is now working on excise communication China project which is also Internet science popularization project. We believe that will benefit millions of Chinese nationals. Meanwhile, CAST has been the support of the IGF for two years by organizing workshops and exhibitions. The topic this year is Internet Governance and Open Government Data initiatives. We feel happy to co‑organize the workshop with Ghana.
First of all, from Beijing University will give us presentation later and I believe this workshop we not only provide wide platform to exchange information for scholars, officials, both from China and Ghana but also offer all of the participants an opportunity to exchange views and share their experience of Internet Governance.
Finally, I wish the workshop success. Thank you.
(Applause).
>> MODERATOR: Thank very much, Madame Wu. I think the next presentation scheduled is for Mr. Eric Akumiah. Is he online? This is supposed to be a remote presentation. While we wait for him to be online, it is a pleasure for me to introduce Professor Tao from Beijing University and post telecommunications to give us representation on cases of open course and the case of China universities. So Professor Tao, you have the floor.
>> TAO XIAOFENG: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, but where is my presentation?
>> MODERATOR: Let me make the following adjustment, can Eric make his presentation now, because that is what is on the slides? So Eric, can we hear you? Mr. Eric Akumiah? Is the remote presenter ready? Okay. Could they change the slides for me so that Professor Tao can move on so we don't hold the discussion so we could please change the slides?
>> TAO XIAOFENG: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you Mr. Chairman, I'm Tao from CAST China Association for Science and Technology. I'm a member of information technology, CCIT. We are talking about open courses from China university. I'm from education sector. I am quite familiar with this area. Here is outline of today's presentation. First, I will briefly introduce the background of courses, how open courses are developed worldwide. The second part I will introduce the open courses, evolution in China.
The last part is about open courses characteristics in China, i.e., what the open courses look like in China. This concept of open courses related to M.I.T ‑‑ originated in M.I.T. in 1999. At that time wanted to achieve M.I.T. mission to enhance technology and educate students. In the year 2000 they proposed M.I.T. open courses where OCW which started story of open courses.
In the year 2005 open courses were OCWC was established. It is a worldwide community with hundreds of higher education institutions which are committed around the world. More and more countries are paying attention to this. In the year 2012, statistics shows that about 14,000 courses from more than 200 universities all over the world are published and available on the Internet.
If OCW is a premature open courses platform then why China is still developing its own open courses. I think three reasons. The first one is language difference. As you may know, English is not commonly used in China, however, most open courses are taught in English which brings a language barrier for Chinese students. The second way is the cultural difference. China is a country where there are 50,000 years civilization and, therefore, we want open courses that are based on China's culture.
The third one is technical problems. The Internet infrastructure in China is still in its early stage with very limited speed. It is more appropriate to view local open courses flat form that can serve students with online radio with huge demand, higher bandwidth and lower latency. Let's talk about the OC's evolution in China. Okay. Here is a fact on open courses evolution in China.
In the year 2003 the Chinese Ministry of Education launched high quality curriculums construction project which aimed its improvement in education quality in Chinese universities. By the end of the year 2010 more than 3600 high quality courses were produced covering 31 provinces, hundreds of colleges. In the year 2011 the choose news Ministry of Education officially launched CVOC project to target user the whole society which is different from the previously high quality curriculum constructions FCC project.
Network portals are also used for large sharing. In the year 2011, 39 universities in China has submitted 1300VVOC total but only 103 are approved. The figure shows on the right some website established by CCV an organization in China. In the year 2012, the open University of China was established officially which based on previous China central radio and TV university with over three million registered students.
China's open courses are expanding its influence across the country. At last we will summarize the open courses characteristics in China. There are three, three key questions that have to be addressed before an OC was constructed. The first one is how to collect all necessary resources for our cost. The second is how to deliver the cost to the public. And three is who is going to use the open courses and how the students and teachers interact. And volunteer for specialized language translation to help translate open courses that are in foreign language to Chinese and open courses will get more feedback from the online students.
For the second questions, let us take open University of China, for example. There are several ways to differentiate courses and materials and information to students. Open courses, open University of China established a digital laboratory with a bounty of reading materials. It also collaborate with open universities which are bringing more resources to the students and also providing education environment.
Such cooperation is shown to be mutually beneficial. Teacher teaching skills improved with yes or no line platform because more people get involved in learning. Teachers get more feedback. Here is a teacher in the PTR university. The course is now principal of communication. It's very important courses for students. More on line resources, more ways to interact with students are always good for students, also for the teachers.
The figure above is a real time classroom from the open University of China. After watching this next video, students can leave comments in the online chat room. Chinese Internet user lays a foundation for the fast development in China. In the near future, the Chinese Government will continue playing an important role in open courses project construction. National top colleges may form a close platform to development systematic courses on the higher tech scientific majors. This is all for my presentation. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Let's give him a round of applause.
(Applause).
We thank you for coming to share your approaches to open courses and now I would like to find out whether the remote presenter is available. If he is, we will go to him, otherwise we will continue it with the panel. So is the remote presenter online? I like to bring some discussion into the meeting, so I would like to first introduce you to the moderator, Mr. Donkor who will proceed with the affairs, so please go ahead.
>> WISDOM DONKOR: Thank you, Mr. Chair. And you are welcome to this session. We are basically going to be discussing Internet Governance and then Open Government Data initiatives. We are looking at how we can bring the two together for the two to kind of talk in relation to the development of Internet Governance and open data. We realize that data always talk about, this data is data that runs on is Internet. So I think it's good we bring together this report so we talk about the policies together and we see how we bring uniformity. So I will introduce the panel and then after the introduction, then Professor who is the Chair will take it from there and we will discuss the subject. We have to my far left Florence Toffa, Florence is the Director for Mobile Web for Ghana. And then we have Professor Tao. Professor Tao is from China, Beijing University, and we have the Chair himself, Professor Nii Quaynor, he is actually the father of Internet in Africa. He was the former board member of ICANN, the former Chair of after AFRINIC and he is also a contributing member to the Internet Governance Open Government Data initiative globally.
Then we have Nnenna Nwakanma is also an Internet Governance advocate and open data. She works with the Web Foundation and she works with the Web bank as well in relation to Open Government Data. Then we have Valentina Pellizzer more or less works with Governments, I believe Government, Civil Society. She works with Civil Society in relation to Internet Governance, open data, anything open, you will find Valentina there. And we have Sonigita Ekpe from Nigeria he is an advocate of open data.
We have our brother from Kenya, Bonface Witaba. He is more into open education. So audience, these are your panel, and Mr. Chair, your audience and your panel.
>> CHAIR: Thank you very much. There are a series of questions that have been raised. Is he online? Okay. So then can we have Eric share with us his presentation? Okay. Let me raise a few presentations. We are all hoping that Open Government Data will help public services and in particular me, I'm very interest in how evidence‑based work can improve planning and development. And there are questions in the benefits of transparency of general operations and how it can improve journalism or for that matter democracy and civil participation to name a few.
So I would like to invite the panelists to each make an initial three‑minute intervention and if we have time they can make closing remarks. I would like to start from my right, so please move on.
>> BONFACE WITABA: Thank you Mr. Chair, the open data initiative has been taking root in Africa. For instance, the World Bank has Kenya, South Africa and Ghana as the pioneers of open data in Africa. So we should be asking why are Governments in a rush to open data to the public? Is it a case to sharing data statistics? So in Kenya, the passing of the Freedom of Information Act acted as a catalyst to the Government setting up the open data initiative whose aim was to create transparency and the act of transparency is in participation and accountability. So these three tenants have provided an avenue for checks and balances within Government, within cities themselves ‑‑ citizens themselves and private sectors.
The Government is able to be put on task to budgetary allocation and expenditure. When you talk open data initiative, I don't think it would be successful if not for the partnership of Open Government Partnership concepts because it's been setting up Government initiatives and steps with their partner countries, for instance, Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania, Liberia are at the forefront of opening the data to the public for public scrutiny. So I think when you look from this perspective, I think it's a more accountable Government which is accountable to the citizens and the citizens are able to know what the Government is up to in terms of how it's spending money, public expenditures from the public coffers.
And the industry is another area where open data can be of great help because we find that in some countries, some of the richest countries in Africa because of their minerals, but in the long run, the country remains poor. Nothing is accountable where the minerals go to. So if you open up data and say A, B, C, D, company come into the country and they are able to mine this number of grams of minerals and they are able to say that this number, this number of dollars so I think we will be able to create citizenry that is able to trust Government in terms of operations.
Thank you.
>> CHAIR: I would like to move along and get Sonigita Ekpe from Nigeria to make his intervention.
>> SONIGITA EKPE: Thank you. I am looking at privacy challenge when it comes to open data. Open data and open Government would really help us through sustainability, but the first is how to balance privacy with transparency and accountability in the contest of public information. The second challenge flows from the disruption of traditional approaches to privacy based on a collapse of the distinction between public and private sector actors.
If that challenge is that of the potential for Open Government Data even if unable to contribute to the big data environment. And the citizens and activities are increasingly monitored and profiled. Now, if we are talking about open data, open Government, definitely the cities have to give up everything, and then we can all be able to start looking at sustainable approaches to coordinate and collaborate for a better living. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: I like to invite Ms. Valentina Pellizzer to make a comment.
>> VALENTINA PELLIZZER: Thank you for the invitation and the introduction. My name is Valentina Pellizzer. I work in digital rights NGO in Bucharest, Romania and I will explain how open data initiatives work in Romania and a little bit of context in Europe. Romania has signed Open Government Partnership in 2011 and since then the Government has awarded more and more focus to open data. A data portal was created, however, in all of these years, there are only 329 data sets so when it comes to developing a public services, definitely we need to ask for more data in order to find out exactly what the benefits for society are there.
Also maybe it's important to mention the fact that in 2013 the European Commission approved the public sector information directive which amends the former directive on by public sector information, so all of the European countries had to implement this text. From my point of view fortunately Romania just did an unfortunate copy based of the text so it lost opportunity to make a step further and to take more advantage of public or free use of public sector information.
And I also would like to mention the fact that more information on public sector use is available on the platform called APSI platform.EU where different national correspondents are putting information relevant from their countries related to open data policies and public sector information. And in just a few hours earlier there was a webinar on standards developed by the world web consortium which focused on explaining how different open data portals could be interoperable, so if anyone from the audience is interested in, works with open data and is interested in integrating more open data platforms, I suggest you check the website and see the recording which is going to be available.
I will stop here and if there are more questions about the Romania situation or Europe, I will be happy to answer. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you very much, Valentina. I think it was a good introduction to bring Nnenna, so please make your presentation.
>> NNENNA NWAKANMA: Good morning, everyone. I'm still wondering why I was invited to this panel because I would have rather sat in my quiet corner. The first submission I will have to make is that we have an open data barometer. The Web Foundation publishes an open data barometer which is a study of over 86 countries in and the impact and effective use and initiatives in open data. And China is not in the first ten.
And I'm surprised that China is co‑organizing this and I want to say thank you for a beginning. I think we will expect more openness from the Government of China in the way it does things, in the way it handles data, and especially in open data for participation for citizen participation and policy. That is my first submission.
Having said that, I got a background paper which says there is as yet no internationally accepted set of ethical standards for releasing and using Open Government Data. That is not correct. Because anyone here who is on line can go to open data charter.dot net. Open Data Charter has been launched and everyone can adopt internationally agreed standards of open data.
The website again is OpenDataCharter.net. Everyone can look at internationally agreed open data standards. I will summarize in a quick way. Open by default, public default should be open by default. In other words, information does not belong to the Government. It belongs to the people. And if Government needs to close it, then it will have to show a reason why it has to be closed.
Timely and comprehensive, if you are giving me data of 2,000 this year, then in most cases it has lost its relevance. Accessible and usable. When you put all of data under copyright, it means we cannot even use it. So we look, I hope somebody like Florence is going to talk to us about open source and open data, openness in technology. So if a Government says we are just releasing data and we type it in a book and you sell the book, well, I not to say UN Conference, but that is total bullshit. So when we are talking about open data, we are talking about formats that can be used. We are talking about open licenses. We are talking about data that is comparable and interoperable so that this year it can be used, next year it can be used and when other formats are open, they also can be interoperable.
We care about that. We are talking about improved governance and citizen engagement, putting out data in itself is not of any goal unless it improves governance, unless it allows citizens to participate, unless it allows for Government accountability, unless it allows for transparency in what you do. So to come here and say we have one open data program X, Y, Z, we don't care about that. What we care is that it is improving governance, it is improving transparency. It is improving democracy.
It is for inclusive development and innovation, and let me close, Mr. Chair, on this session, by saying that we are here for Internet and Sustainable Development Goals. Let's not forget about the sustainability we are looking for in our development. On the 28th of September we as Web Foundation launched Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data because we know that on our own as countries we may not able to pull it off. So we need this place for sharing lessons. We need the space for global collaborators. We need the space for us to do things together.
When we talk about global goals, it does not just mean about poor and rich countries, it means the 7 billion of us. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. If I have offended anybody, I intentionally meant to do so.
(Applause).
>> CHAIR: Well, thank you very much. As you know my style, everyone is welcome, and anyone who comes is contributing simply by participating so I'm just glad that China is participating. Having said that, I would like to invite Madame Florence Toffa to make opening remarks.
>> FLORENCE TOFFA: I have an organization called Mobile Ghana. We are running a project called Code for Ghana. The essence of the project, I mean we are talking about open data initiative, the Government should release data, which is a wonderful idea. This presents us with a new opportunity. After releasing the data, what is next, we need to drive the demand side of data. How do we encourage citizens to go online and pick that data and make money out of it? So we have done a lot of open data hacker tones in my organization.
We have been able to train the youth to just take simple population data of Ghana, for instance, the last time we did it, they were able to visualize using the data in many places have places of convenience, how many accidental data in the country. People with no skills were able to do that within two days of the hack‑a‑thon.
So this is what we are advocating that it's good for people to release data to people, it's good to get the data online. How do we drive the data for it to benefit citizens? How would we reduce data for ordinary citizens to be able to understand? One of the aspects of the projects we are also running is training news room journalists to be able to do the journalism, to be able to represent data in a way that citizens can connect with the data because they are at the front line.
They communicate directly. They are able to meet massive number of people to be able to read news items. So what we realized through the project is that traditional journalists, people who have been in the mainstream journalists for a long time, they are usually hesitant to undergo the training. They will start and not end. So the bridge that we adopted is to go through the organizations that are training these journalists, like the new budding journalists in the country.
So we were able to organize a training that had this new journalist that way in the first year. We were surprised the first year that we did it, the room was very full and they were very excited, and after that we had about 50 of them signing up to do data journalism. So my focus and my interest and my passion is to be able to translate this open data we are talking about. How does it benefit? How does it create new set of ecosystem where we have people talking about policies, we have people talking about data representation, people doing hack‑a‑thon, people doing different aspects?
So my whole passion is to be able to see a whole new ecosystem developing out of this open data initiative that we have. Thank you.
>> MONDERATOR: Thank you very much. I think you have had a wide variety of issues raised. You have also seen one application and a lot of different issues have been raised. I would like to engage the community immediately. So if anyone wants to make a comment or raise their question, please, the mics are open. And I would like to encourage questions. Please, go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. My name is Sita, I work in Indonesia and the Philippines. I would like to share with you on the definition of open data. I would like to add another dimension of what Nnenna was saying earlier about interoperability, about the format. In our case, in Indonesia and the Philippines it's really difficult to have directly good quality of open data, so the best main narratives that we have in Indonesia is elections, which is a cross source initiative from open data, but it's actually not open data, it's PDF format. The election commissions is opening our balloted counting in a PDF and people are together crowd source the data and make it into more better narratives on open data.
So I need to challenge that open data charter as well. So I think we need to also open the dimensions because, you know, the capacity of the Government itself in opening the data in Southeast Asia in particular in the countries that I work is very much not yet there. We have a very big gaps on that capacity. So I think we need not to be very restricted in giving meaning for open data in specifically the open data format and interoperability. We need to be more, more into the transparency and accountability perspective. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: I would like to take a few more questions and I will ask panelists to respond. Please go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, to the panelists for that insight for information. I just want to ask a quick question. I believe open data is no doubt a force for good with regard to the numerous benefits that have been outlined by our distinguished panelists, however, I think it comes with its own inherent risk. Data quality, some of the information, for instance, if you take crime data, it can be insightful, but it can also be misleading. Now, what measures are being put in place? I have not seen website Nnenna spoke about but what security controls are being put in place to make sure that all of the risks are mitigated?
The second question I have has to do with meaningful data. This data that is being put there is data. I mean, it's in its raw form, and the citizenry have to make meaningful information out of the data. Now, it takes skills to actually take the data and transform it into meaningful information to be used. Now, if you go to the grassroots citizens who we say we are making data available to them, what skill set do they have to actually take the data and transform it or convert it into meaningful information that can actually be used. So actually that is my question. What controls, how are we going to build capacity? How are we going to build the knowledge base and skills to actually take this data and convert it into meaningful decisions?
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
>> CHAIR: Next one.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from the Secretariat of transparency here, and we deal with all of these challenges. We are all working with free software and open standards formats to give people, to give the data and treat it. But what the real challenge is, and this is my question, how you deal and what do you do to make people engage over this data? Because we live in a city with a million people, and we have only at tops 100, 120 people have access or getting access to the data. So we work to open it. We give it out. We put it under open formats, but if people is not getting, appropriating that data and using it.
And this seems to be now, well, maybe in Brazil the biggest problem and how effectively make people use it to transform society.
>> CHAIR: Last question, and then we will round up.
>> AUDIENCE: It's a short comment, but my name is Raul I'm from Electronic Frontier Finland. I worked with the Finish party for several years. We seem to be the only party in the world that specifically advocates open Government. Unlike other parties we want to change the current political system through open initiatives to change the laws and increasing the transparency of Governments through publishing the information that is used for the decision making by the political parties.
This lowers the threshold that Governments have for the citizen's participation by giving them a chance to challenge the information that the politicians have before the decisions are made. This decentralizes power which as far as I can see is practically always a change for the better. We want to encourage all of the political parties of the world to publish the information they use or explain for each case why that cannot be done. Thanks, Nnenna for highlighting this principle that should be advocated all over the world. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Last one.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Andre, I'm from the youth IGF program from CGI and ISOC and from the observatory of Latin America and Caribbean youth. My question is similar to his question, but from the perspective of the youth, I would like to know this process of education capacities to understand and criticize and appropriate the open data, how can we have this process to educate the youth so we can have this open data that, okay, we don't have the open data, but when we have the open data, we can criticize the data and we can use the data to change the world effectively. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you. Please, you have a mic.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Hello, thank you all for prior sharing knowledge. My name is Carolina, I work at WCT Brazil office. I green 100% of Nnenna. And just to share with you that I think participation is also a huge issue that we have to care about when we talk about open data. And not only for Government, but also the question about how the citizens could use the data so it's important to engage them, indeed. And to share with you just a quick comment that we have capacitation online for free. If someone is interested, I can give you the link later, just come and talk with me. It's open data and Semantic Web and Wiki data. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Are there any remote questions? Okay. This is our chance to conclude. I would like to invite each of the panelists including Prusatou to make closing remarks. Please stay within a minute or two. I go this time from my left. So Madame Florence. You start.
>> FLORENCE TOFFA: My closing remark is that obviously we cannot get every single citizen, we cannot build their capacity, but what we can do as organizations as people of open data advocates is we can work, we can collaborate with organizations that have a wider reach to their citizens. We can work with media organizations, we can meet with Civil Society organizations to build the capacity of these citizens and engage the citizens. So someone asked the question how do we engage people about this data? So, for instance, one of the media houses that we train, they were able to visualize a data set of district assembly elections and they had never done that in the newspaper, but they were able to publish it, and they got good response from online and from the print media, for instance.
So this is one way that we can engage people over how to use the data, how they can make meaning out of the data so we can get the developers, we can work with technology hubs, we can create one, we can get at one and then supports and be able to build that data. Even when data is available on Government website we can give simple training for people to be ail to script that data and visualize the data and make meaning out of data. If we are able to do is that, if one single person, one single youth is able to analyze the data and put it on his or her Facebook file, it reaches a whole number of people. So that is the individual capacity building that we are talking about. And as much as we want to engage over the data set that we have, let's build small capacity one at a time. And if they are able to share this data set, this digitalization shared media becomes ripple effect and people will be able to engage the Government on specific issues that they want to get results from.
>> CHAIR: Professor Tao.
>> TAO XIAOFENG: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's to Open Government Data for the public is very important and urgent and this would be benefit to video, companies and also Governments themselves. As a scientist when I want to make big data analysis the situation here is low data, and sometimes you are a person with very strong big data alliances, but there has low data. Sometimes a company or Government with data, but maybe have low time for analysis. This is the situation.
And here I also want to introduce a talk from our Prime Minister in the third session of the 12th national people's Congress this year, March 6th, he said Government data should be open to the public as much as possible except some confidential data. This data can be used by various Cloud Computing companies to improve social services and also useful for the Government decision maker. Thank you very much.
>> CHAIR: Nnenna.
>> NNENNA NWAKANMA: Thank you. I still honestly feel that we are afraid of jumping two feet into what Open Government Data is. Mr. Manne, what open data are you publishing, because the open data barometer of 2014 shows that in the 84 countries that we have studied, only 13% of the countries are publishing their budgets, only 8% of Governments are publishing spending, only 6% are publishing information of contracts, and only 3% are publishing information on ownership of companies?
Maybe we will talk later, but I would like to know if they help us out as a city is publishing these. If you put this on line, you can be sure you have 1,000 per day because everybody wants to see that information. So the question is what level of information are we publishing? And mind you, this is information that people should have. So if you go home from here, please look for the budget, the spending and the contract and the ownership of companies. Make this open and we will check it out.
Having said is that, Mr. Chair, I think that back to the question, the Internet and Open Government Data, I think that 16 years ago when we were adopting the MDGs, we did not have enough bandwidth in the world. We did not have a lot of people connected to the Internet. We did not have a lot of sharing capacities. We did not have a lot of computing capacities. But now we do. I agree that there is still data literacy. There is still data engagement on the part of citizens. We need to build capacity, but let's use the capacity that we have.
The Internet has multiplicity inherent in it. So let's use the Internet to share Open Government Data. And this, let me tell you, if you share Government data in Brazil, it helps people in Kenya. If you share Government data in South Africa, it helps people in Nigeria, if you share Government data in Ghana, it helps people in Bolivia. So the Internet makes it possible for us to have a global data world, and that will be my last word today. Let us give all of the information that we can. Let us fight for everybody to have the Internet and let us use the Internet as one single tool to help us push the development goals. Thank you for having me.
>> VALENTINA PELLIZZER: Well, after hearing Nnenna speak, no one can add anything else, so to the best of my ability I will just share, I will share examples of how Civil Society gather up to build some open data apps and really since 2012, 2013 there have been two open ‑‑ one coalition on open data and another coalition on open educational resources, so both people from Civil Society, Government, and the private sector have gathered up to meet regularly and to find solutions to push this movement forward in Romania.
And from my point of view, some of the best examples in Romania were a website with open budgets from absolutely every region in Romania, from every city which was a huge effort done by one single NGO. And this connects to the question on how you engage citizens. So when there are social problems, when there are issues that affect a number of people, citizens get the tendency to collide and to collaborate on building something which is useful for them.
And it can happen in two ways. Thinking from the experience from Romania, if you think of something funny, for example, we once looked at the public procurement data in Romania, and we found out that there were companies registered in Antarctica which was, of course, absurd. And when there are tragedies, that's another way when people just come together. I'll just finish with this. There was a fire in a nightclub in Bucharest killing lots of people. So just simple citizens gather up on Facebook to map all of the clubs in Bucharest and to see whether they have safety measurements in place. So I think the human nature of all of this aspects really brings us together to make the open data movement go further. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: A real quick one for me.
>> SONIGITA EKPE: Getting citizens engaged on using open data, data is only useful when people have needs. And people also need to recognize that they need to give up their privacy because this is what is causing hurting of data. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Bonface.
>> BONFACE WITABA: Today the Internet has transformed into an Internet of Things. With over 5 billion devices connected to the Internet there is no reason at all why Governments should not open data to the citizens. They need to use collaborative tools, innovative tools as well to engage people because transparency plus collaboration and innovation and participation equals to openness. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: I like to thank all of you for your participation and your patience even though we had technical difficulties, but I do like to make one or two points. I think open data is really just beginning, so let us not assume that it is done and people are late. We are just beginning so anybody is welcome. I also tend to take the path that if you go with the Development Agenda, you are likely to gain the transparency and all of the good things that you want.
I suggest that this time this topic may be too big and try and make multiple workshops out of it so that you will be able to dive in more. I just say thank you very much for your support. Thank you.
(Applause)