Skip to main content

Open Data in Trinidad and Tobago

Image
By
What is open data? Open data is free to use and share and made available in standard formats that facilitate this. The data is available without legal, technological or social restrictions.

Why open data? At a high level we are looking at ease and facilitating data driven decision making and its benefits. We looking at accountability, efficiency and innovation. The open knowledge foundation does a good job of answering this question in their open data handbook under why open data?

As a coder and web developer, I am particularly interested in the apps, visualisations and infographics, among other things, that can be created. At the recently held GDG POS firebase study jam I saw examples of how the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Health covid-19 stats could be nicely graphed and filtered. That data had to be scraped and manually entered instead of being accessible in an open data format.

We are ranked 67th (out of 94) in the 2016 Global Open Data Index with a score of 21%. That is pretty dismal and leaves a lot of room for improvement. From the Open Data Barometer website we see that the data exist and most is available online BUT not in machine readable and useable format. We have data.gov.tt and data.tt with very little to show. Where is CSO in all of this? They have a nice enough website and platform and some useful stats. Can't be too hard to extend this. Every Ministry should be mandated to provide at least 10 open data feeds as part of their website development to get the ball rolling so to speak.

While researching for this blog post I came across this link that says that Trinidad and Tobago has been withdrawn from the Open Government Partnership. It states that, "This decision follows the 2018 resolution of the OGP Steering Committee to designate Trinidad and Tobago as inactive in OGP due to failure to deliver an action plan since 2016." Open data is a big part of open government.

Open data and open government are things that we should be prioritising. The benefits and needs are clear but we seem to be lacking the will power and guidance. I want to see a dedicated Minister of Technology. Someone who appreciates the importance of open data and who could pick up the slack.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hobby project - Store and view exchange rates

By
The next step in my project was to test out being able store and display the rates in a database. I decided to use nodejs and supabase for this. Everything worked beautifully. Only hickup was the following error due to my package.json not being correct. SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module Added this to package.json   "type": "module" This works beautifully. Right now I am just testing fragments of what could be part of a bigger system to see what is possible and what works and how easy to code on a mobile. There is no fully functioning integrated end to end system just yet. This is also what I tested. A serverless append-only database using GitHub + Actions + Pages. That’s basically a lightweight backend system. This was the ChatGPT prompt I used. Guide me through each step. This is what I want. A manually run github actions that adds to docs/data.json with the current date and time. docs/index.html displays all the entries in data.json. Make s...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is important

By
Every now and again, I get reminded of the why. Why I have handed my life over to God. It is 3:08 p.m. and I have decided to write. Honestly, I feel like I could end this blog post right here. What more is there to say? God above all else. God is our compass on this journey called life. Everything else can become a distraction. Maybe not everything, but certainly many things. You get the point. What is important? What do we prioritise? What do we make time for? The answers look different for everyone. Our lives are different. We are tested differently. We are all products of our circumstances, and those circumstances vary from person to person. Yet God is the common thread across humanity and throughout time. God always was and always will be. One day, we will answer to God. We will give account to God. We cannot live without food, water, and oxygen, but all of those things come from God. So how can we live without God? How timely. I just received a notification from the Quranly app: S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Running php and apache on termux

By
This was my experience getting php and apache to run on termux apt update && apt upgrade -y apt install php-apache I was following an old blog post that used php 7 and got these errors Can't locate API module structure `php7_module' in file /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/libexec/apache2/libphp.so: undefined symbol: php7_module Cannot load /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/libexec/apache2/libphp7.so Corrected in apache config file vim $PREFIX/etc/apache2/httpd.conf LoadModule php_module /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/libexec/apache2/libphp.so Apache is running a threaded MPM, but your PHP Module is not compiled to be threadsafe.  You need to recompile PHP. Comment out mpm_worker and use mpm_prefork #LoadModule mpm_worker_module libexec/apache2/mod_mpm_worker.so LoadModule mpm_prefork_module libexec/apache2/mod_mpm_prefork.so This still does not work as apache (httpd) was failing silently. According to Chatty LoadModule php_module ...libphp.so often fails in Termux becau...
Post a Comment
Read more