By on February 27, 2017
Code for Ghana is once again organizing the Open Data Day Ghana at Mobile Web Ghana. The theme for this year’s event is “Open Contracting and tracking public money flow”.
Open contracting involves analysing government contract data to have a better understanding of how government spent public funds on some projects. Ghanaians would like to know for example: How much money was spent to build the new Kwame Nkrumah Interchange? How did the government decide which company got the contract? Did that company actually deliver according to the contract?
These are some of the questions that citizens of this country need answers to. However, it is the task of data analysts to analyse this data and civic technologists to visualize the data or develop apps / visualizations that will help the ordinary citizen better understand these issues.
Participants will be expected to scrape, clean, analyse and visualize data on government spending. At the end of the day, we expect participants to build their skill set in analysing and visualizing data. Open Data has power, especially when placed in the hands of civic technologists and data analysts to reveal great insights, and discrepancies. This is why we will be working on data surrounding how the previous government spent public funds. Hopefully some interesting data visualizations and simple web applications will be developed that can help citizens better understand government spending.
We are inviting journalists, civic technologists, data scientists, statisticians, software developers etc. to come and participate in this event which will be taking place at Mobile Web Ghana, Agbogba - North Legon, Accra. We are looking forward to building a vibrant open data ecosystem with you.