Enhancing Citizen Engagement with Open Data

Open data is a tool for civic empowerment, but not all civil society organizations (CSOs) have the skills to collect and analyse it. With proper use of open data, CSOs can get valuable information, including the right to exercise civic responsibility over government bodies. With the ability to use open data, user can take any city or metropolitan area and find out the whole plan of public expenditures for all institutions.

CSI delivered training sessions “Citizen Engagement with Open Government Data”. It is sponsored by the Collaborative Governance Programme, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, and implemented by the East-West Management Institute. These training sessions allowed 40 participants from civil society organizations across Kyrgyzstan to gain basic skills in working with open data and turning large raw data into reliable sources of information. The training agenda also included a Datathon competition, where trainees were challenged by their mentors to develop specific projects on data and media products, using the knowledge and skills gained during the training.