In July 2010, I was invited to be the Advisor in the reference group for the ‘Open Data Study’ – commissioned by the Transparency & Accountability Initiative, c/o Open Society Foundation, UK.
Under the initiative, apart from a report on Open Data Study, two sets of country case studies were produced: One was conducted by the World Wide Web Foundation (for Chile, Ghana (and Turkey)) – Chile report, Ghana report and another was conducted by the Centre for Internet and Society (for India) – India report.
As a member of the reference group – I had the great opportunity to get exposed to the latest happenings in the ‘Open Data’ field. However, at that time, I could not find any instances of involvement of any national statistics offices in this domain – though they are considered critical government organs concerning ‘data’ about the country.
With time, things must change.
With http://devinforwanda.gov.rw/ and http://imisrwanda.gov.rw/ in existence (with access to data in open and machine-readable formats) – I’m exploring now the role that the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) may play in this endeavour – under the broader responsibility of the coordinator of the National Statistical System (NSS) in Rwanda.
I have some public climate data that I gathered while working at the World Bank. I will be in Kigali in late January and I would love to help out. With a little work we could tailor the data specifically for Rwanda and show both historical and projected data for rainfall and temperature. let me know!