Development Workshop’s senior ICT/GIS expert Kamal D’Nigel attended the Sante Fe Institute’s three-day workshop from November 19 to 21, 2014 titled “Acting Locally, Understanding Globally – Building an International Community of Practice for Neighbourhood Data Collection” on behalf of Cities Alliance. The workshop served as a unique opportunity to bring together researchers, community and nongovernmental organizations, open-source software developers, and representatives from the United Nations, World Bank, and various philanthropic foundations within the urban planning/design sphere to contribute and raise awareness of the importance in working together in the co-production of information to achieve greater impact. The workshop highlighted examples of successes of uses of locally collected data in urban planning with the objective of identifying needs for technological improvements and organizational coordination efforts.
The final day also allowed DW to showcase its experience on the participatory gathering of urban information, mapping data, working with local communities and providing guidance to local government on policies and strategies. The presentation started off with a brief introduction to DW and the context of things in Angola. From there two projects were presented: Voices of Citizens for Urban Change (supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Cities Alliance) and GSMA Mobil Water Monitoring, a project born out of “Voices of Citizens for Urban Change” in relation to water provision.
A key finding from DW’s programs is about the co-production and co-ownership of information between urban communities and local government. This innovative approach facilitates the transformation of information into tools for public policy influencing since the data is co-owned by local municipalities from the beginning and supports a sense of common ground in the defence of community interests in improving access to basic services, tenure rights and participative planning. It was suggested by a number of conference participants that this approach to co-production developed by DW should be shared with partners internationally.
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