Soft­ware de­vel­op­ers, jour­nal­ists and in­no­va­tors with an in­ter­est in tech­nol­o­gy and trans­paren­cy will ben­e­fit from a one-day open da­ta work­shop tak­ing place to­day at the Kapok Ho­tel, Port-of -Spain, from 9 am to 4 pm.The event, host­ed by the T&T 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."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 work­shop is part of TTEITI's road­show de­signed to share the con­tents of the first re­port with the pub­lic.