Category: Research

Research, investigation

Can we find out in IATI who is responding to ‘Matthew’?

At the end of IODC16, Roderick Besseling of Cordaid asked me a simple question: hurricane Matthew has hit Haiti, with well over 800 casualties reported already. Can we see in the IATI data which humanitarian responses have been started? Can we make that data available on HDX, the Humanitarian Data Exchange? Sure, I thought, with […]
Rolf 13 Comments

Traceability and Linking in IATI Data

Today I had the privilege to present at the “Big and Open Data for International Development Workshop” at the Centre for Development Informatics of the University of Manchester. In my abstract, I anticipated deep research into traceability of activities in IATI data. We’ve certainly made great strides, and, as one participant of our IATI Learning Workshop […]
Rolf 4 Comments

Examining structures in IATI (2)

I’m some two months into exploring traceability in IATI data, spending free hours (days…) on developing tools to do more. In April, the Strategic Partnerships funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs are expected to publish their first data, so that’s a good chance to see how well they managed to tie all their […]
Rolf 4 Comments

Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing. Dr Mike Taylor in The Guardian

Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing. Dr Mike Taylor in The Guardian:
For Elsevier, the biggest of the barrier-based publishers, we can calculate the total cost per article as £1,605m subscription revenue divided by 240,000 articl…
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Describing organisational relations

One of the side-events of the Open Government Data Camp, last week, was an Organisational Identifiers Workshop put together by Tim Davies and Chris Taggart. The meeting discussed the various challenges in linking information about organisations held in separate data sets. Although participants were careful to avoid the word “ontology“, one of the break-out groups […]
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All hands on deck: building civil society 2.0

I’ve been invited to talk at the World Congress on IT 2010, in the eGovernment track. Together with Beth Noveck, Ivo Gormley, and Greg Clark, we’ll have a session and panel called “Hey gov, can you hear me?”, moderated by Dom Sagolla. Arnout Ponsioen invited me to present a case from the perspective of civil society, and I chose to illustrate the possibilities of people all over the world working together in a moment of crisis: the Haiti earthquake. Here is what I had to say.

All hands on deck: building civil society 2.0

View more presentations from Rolf Kleef.
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“Doing things together online”

Recently, a couple of events allowed me to look again at how groups of people “do things together online”.

I’ve had a chance to meet up a few times in a short period with Aldo de Moor, and that helped us reflect on where things have come since we first drafted the contours of our “social context model”, nearly ten years ago now.

Add a few potential projects in the pipeline that deal with global networks of people who should produce something together. And the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into the NABUUR concept, to see how it is still pretty unique.

Aldo and I quickly concluded that although a lot is happening, and happening fast, there actually has been little progress in what we see as the hardest part of (online) collaboration: supporting work flows. Sure enough, people find ways to use the techno-centric tools that emerge, and services like Basecamp are making inroads into this. But most platforms still have some way to go.

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