Ger­ard Best

Soft­ware de­vel­op­ers, jour­nal­ists and in­no­va­tors with an in­ter­est in tech­nol­o­gy and trans­paren­cy will ben­e­fit from a one-day open da­ta work­shop to be held Thurs­day.

The event, host­ed by the the Trinidad and To­ba­go Ex­trac­tive In­dus­tries Trans­paren­cy Ini­tia­tive(TTEITI), will use da­ta pub­lished in the first TTEITI re­port, pub­lished on Sep­tem­ber 30.

The re­port con­tains de­tails about the way the en­er­gy sec­tor op­er­ates, and re­veals for the first time the in­di­vid­ual pay­ments made by oil and gas com­pa­nies–both pri­vate and state–to the Gov­ern­ment on an an­nu­al ba­sis."

The spe­cial open da­ta work­shop will guide par­tic­i­pants in build­ing web and mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions, gen­er­at­ing cus­tom re­ports and build­ing da­ta vi­su­al­i­sa­tions. It will be fa­cil­i­tat­ed by in­ter­na­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy ex­pert Bevil Wood­ing," said Mark Reg­is, head of the TTEITI sec­re­tari­at.

"Open Da­ta is an ap­proach to pro­mote the ide­al that cer­tain da­ta should be freely avail­able in for­mats that al­low any­one to use and re­pub­lish as they wish, with­out re­stric­tion. In this work­shop, we'll be dis­cussing the ben­e­fits of open da­ta in im­prov­ing trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty in gov­er­nance."

The da­ta pro­duced from the TTEITI's first re­port will be made avail­able in an open for­mat and will be used to demon­strate some prac­ti­cal ways to ex­tract valu­able in­for­ma­tion from open da­ta sources," said Wood­ing, Chief Knowl­edge Of­fi­cer of Con­gress WBN and founder of the Bright­Path Foun­da­tion.

Trinidad and To­ba­go was the first coun­try to re­lease a mo­bile app as part of the pub­li­ca­tion of the in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­ces­si­ble re­port.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Ex­trac­tive In­dus­tries Trans­paren­cyIni­tia­tiveis an In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IADB) fund­ed pro­gram.

The Open Da­ta work­shop is part of TTEITI's road­show de­signed to share the con­tents on the first re­port with the gen­er­al pub­lic.It will be held at the Kapok Ho­tel, Port of Spain from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Copies of the re­port can be down­loaded from the TTEITI Web sitewww.tteiti.org.ttor via the TTEITI mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion avail­able in the Google Play store.