Open Knowledge Ethiopia community was founded by
volunteer individuals from different Universities and Research Institutes to advocate for
Open Knowledge in Ethiopia. We have Librarians, Lecturers, ICT experts and data professionals in the
community. The community conducted its first meetup on 10, May 2015 and the
agenda was to get to know each other and to decide focus areas for the
community. After deliberating on different areas of Open Knowledge, the members
have decided to focus on Open Science and Open Data areas as some of the
community members have experience working with these domains. The community has
also planned activities that the community will engage for the next six months.
We have
identified list of activities to engage for the Open Science. Since most of the
communities are lecturers in the Universities, the members agreed to make a
presentation on Open Science to their students and colleague scientist so as to
create awareness on open Science including opening research publications , research data, figures, models, algorithms, software, tools, notebooks,
laboratory designs and so on.
Member from the library have agreed to include open science awareness as parts
of their information literacy program. The Librarians have also promised to
strengthen their open access programme in the areas of Open Access journals and
repositories. Moreover, Colleagues from the Addis Ababa University Libraries
has informed the community that they will organize an international workshop on
Open Research Data in collaboration with Electronic Information for Libraries
(EIFL) on which international speakers will make a presentation on their
practical implementation of open research data. It is expected that following
the workshop, Addis Ababa University and other Universities as well as research
institutes will start implementing Open research data.
With regard
to Open Data, the community appreciate that all the Co-founders of an
organization called code4Ethiopia which advocates for Open Data are members of
the group. So, the community decided to work in collaboration with
Code4Ethiopia in relation with open data initiative. Colleagues from
code4Ethiopia have briefed the members that they have already planned to
visualize Ethiopian election data which will be conducted in May 25 so as to
promote the values of data to the citizens as well as to the Government and non
Governmental organizations. The organization have also planned to build a
portal for Open contracting for increased disclosure and participation in
public contracting including tendering, performance and completion so as to
minimize the millions of dollars that the Ethiopian Government and other
organizations incur in advertizing tenders and processing . All members have also been
invited to contribute to Open Data activities of the organization.
The
community has also discussed on potential stakeholders to work with and the
group has decided to partner with Consortium of Ethiopian Academic and Research
Libraries, Addis Ababa University (AAU) Libraries, Code4Ethiopia, School of
Information Science of AAU and International organizations like African Union,
UN organs which are based in Addis Ababa.
