Ger­ard Best

Do you want an eas­i­er way to track T&T's oil and gas rev­enue? There's an app for that! And fol­low­ing a work­shop to pro­mote open da­ta host­ed by the T&T Ex­trac­tive In­dus­tries Trans­paren­cy Ini­tia­tive (TTEITI), there may soon be more than one.

TTEITI is part of a glob­al ini­tia­tive that pro­motes ac­count­abil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy by com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments in­volved in ex­trac­tive in­dus­tries, such as gas, oil, quar­ry­ing and min­ing. Held in part­ner­ship with the in­ter­na­tion­al non-prof­it Bright­Path Foun­da­tion, the event at­tract­ed a di­verse au­di­ence of tech­nol­o­gists, new me­dia prac­ti­tion­ers and busi­ness in­no­va­tors in­ter­est­ed in soft­ware de­vel­op­ment for so­cial change.

The work­shop is part of the TTEITI sec­re­tari­at's on­go­ing ef­forts to pub­li­cise the con­tents of its first re­port, ti­tled Mak­ing Sense of T&T's En­er­gy Dol­lars, pub­lished last Sep­tem­ber. The re­port pro­vides in­de­pen­dent­ly rec­on­ciled fig­ures for com­pa­ny pay­ments and gov­ern­ment rev­enues and re­ceipts for fis­cal year 2010 to 2011.Through its part­ner­ship with Bright­Path, TTEITI was the first to have a mo­bile app cre­at­ed as part of the re­lease of the re­port da­ta.

Open ac­cess

Mark Reg­is, head of the TTEITI Sec­re­tari­at, cred­it­ed Bright­Path with pro­vid­ing the "ecosys­tem" of hu­man and tech­ni­cal ca­pac­i­ty need­ed to ex­tract the tech­ni­cal and fi­nan­cial da­ta con­tained in the lengthy, writ­ten re­port and con­vert it to a ma­chine-read­able for­mat that can be used by in­ter­est­ed soft­ware de­vel­op­ers to build use­ful ap­pli­ca­tions.

"What TTEITI need­ed was a way to get their in­for­ma­tion out to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. And that's ex­act­ly what the tech­nol­o­gy al­lows," said Bright­Path ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor, Bevil Wood­ing."We recog­nised that this need­ed to be part of a much broad­er con­ver­sa­tion about the need for greater open­ness in the pub­li­ca­tion of pub­lic da­ta across all sec­tors, hence the idea to host the Open Da­ta Work­shop," Wood­ing said.

"What we've done here for en­er­gy, can al­so be done for health, ed­u­ca­tion, com­merce, trans­port, works, na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and oth­er ar­eas where pub­lic da­ta is not eas­i­ly ac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic. This is tech­nol­o­gy be­ing used for the greater good. That's what we're go­ing af­ter."

De­vel­op­ers wel­come

The next step, Wood­ing said, is to en­cour­age more young peo­ple, es­pe­cial­ly sec­ondary school stu­dents with an in­ter­est in tech­nol­o­gy, to see them­selves as hav­ing a valu­able role to play in the open da­ta move­ment for na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.Ir­win Williams, a post­grad­u­ate Com­put­er Stud­ies stu­dent at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) De­part­ment of Com­put­ing and In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy and a pro­fes­sion­al soft­ware de­vel­op­er at Teleios Sys­tems, fa­cil­i­tat­ed the hackathon seg­ment of the work­shop.

"This was the first time a gov­ern­ment agency pre­sent­ed its da­ta in an open for­mat and in­vit­ed de­vel­op­ers to come out and write apps on it," Williams said in a blog post Fri­day."The app that re­sult­ed from the process al­lowed us to even think about the da­ta dif­fer­ent­ly...I'm glad we were able to be part of what I hope to be the first of many such ini­tia­tives."

By the end of the code­sprint, Williams had guid­ed par­tic­i­pants to com­plete one app fo­cused on the dif­fer­ences be­tween Gov­ern­ment's ex­pect­ed re­ceipts and com­pa­nies' re­port­ed pay­ments. Par­tic­i­pants com­mit­ted to com­plet­ing sev­er­al oth­er apps, all of which aim to make it eas­i­er for the av­er­age cit­i­zen to track how the coun­try man­ages its nat­ur­al re­source wealth.Among the coders was Nigel Hen­ry, founder and lead an­a­lyst of So­lu­tion By Sim­u­la­tion.

"The work­shop opened my eyes to the fact that soft­ware de­vel­op­ment is a nec­es­sary link be­tween da­ta col­lec­tion and pub­lic da­ta analy­sis. I re­alise now that peo­ple who call them­selves da­ta sci­en­tists can and should play a part in cre­at­ing mo­bile and desk­top apps that al­low in­ter­est­ed per­sons who are not pro­fes­sion­al da­ta an­a­lysts to ma­nip­u­late da­ta in use­ful ways," Hen­ry said.Hen­ry said he pre­vi­ous­ly wrote code as "just a per­son­al hob­by" but he now sees it as "a pro­fes­sion­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to con­tribute to na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment."

Fol­low the mon­ey

"The con­cept of open da­ta is to­tal­ly in step with the es­sen­tial man­date and core vi­sion of EITI," said Reg­is. "Fol­low­ing the da­ta is fol­low­ing the mon­ey."Reg­is de­scribed the open da­ta work­shop as the next log­i­cal step in TTEITI's on­go­ing cen­tral mis­sion to make in­for­ma­tion about wealth dis­tri­b­u­tion more eas­i­ly and per­ma­nent­ly ac­ces­si­ble to the en­tire pop­u­la­tion.

"Peo­ple aren't gen­er­al­ly in­ter­est­ed in read­ing about rev­enue fig­ures. So they may not read our 70-page re­port or even the 12-page sum­ma­ry, but us­ing the TTEITI app they can still get an­swers to spe­cif­ic ques­tions about the coun­try's wealth."T&T was the first coun­try to re­lease a mo­bile app as part of the pub­li­ca­tion of the in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­ces­si­ble re­port. Copies of the re­port can be down­loaded via app, in the Google Play store.

The work­shop took place Thurs­day at Kapok Ho­tel, Port of Spain. Pre­sen­ters in­clud­ed Ger­ard Best, Guardian new me­dia ed­i­tor, Keisha Thomas, a UK-based open da­ta re­searcher, and Dr Patrick Ho­sein and Dr Kim Mal­lalieu, both of The UWI St Au­gus­tine.TTEITI plans to hold sev­er­al sim­i­lar events in 2014.