Modern Trends and effective tools for open government: that was the topic for day 1 of a 4 day open week. This is just one of a series of activities and workshops held under the project entitled "Promoting an open government ecosystem in Belize". It is a partnership between Trust for the Americas and the OAS. Local project coordinator, Henry Wade told us more about the first ever open week.
Henry Wade, Local Coordinator, Trust for the Americas
"So Belize Open week is a four day forum, a four day event starting today. Each day we have different themes and a different activity and event taking place. Today we are having training workshops done by international experts who have come from all over the world, the Caribbean, South and Central America to be here to share their knowledge, skills and expertise."
"Open government is about collaboration, it is a multi-stakeholder process so it is great to see government public sector partners sitting with their civil society colleagues and under the civil society umbrella you have NGO's, you have media, you have academia, you have the private sector so it is a healthy mix and that mix helps to promote collaboration between two sides if you will, the civil society side and the government side in building better services through open government and open data for the Belizean public."
One important topic that was discussed is open data, which is information that citizens can readily access and use in their daily lives. Effective Public Management Specialist at the OAS Mike Mora discussed the benefits as well as the limitations of open data.
Mike Mora, Specialist, Effective Public Management Dept. OAS
"Open data is a concept that calls for the opening, publishing of digital information that is processed and created by government public institutions."
"Open data calls for the use and re-use of that information to create value."
"There are certain principles of open data and there are certain things that when opening data need to be looked at, the first one, one that is very important, you need to make sure you don't open information that violates the privacy of the citizen if there is personal information there so there should be certain considerations made when handling personal information, for that, there are policies and regulations that need to be followed that are in compliance with national and international regulating data protection and the second thing that is important to say as well is that you don't want to also open that information that might compromise the national security of the country."
Courtney Weatherburne, reporter
"Who can use this platform, how will it benefit the public and where do you start in terms of open data?"
Mike Mora
"The end user, not the end user, the ones who needs to benefit from it is the actual citizen, a citizen who can have public transport information on it's phone out of open data, a citizen that can find where the medication is out of open data, a citizen that can know how the school system is doing to make better decisions for their children so that citizen is the one who will benefit from open data."
Belize Open week concludes on Friday. The US, Canada and Mexico among other countries have implemented open data. Belize and other Caribbean countries are in the beginning stages of getting to know more about open data.
Also, in November the team is accepting proposals from civil society groups. These proposals have to be in line with the promotion of open government and open data.
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