The Caribbean Open Data Conference

The Caribbean Open Data Conference was the first regional, multi-country conference and software developer competition of its kind, focused on Open Data and Social development. The Caribbean Open Data conference, themed “Developing the Caribbean” is a multi-country event, comprising an Open Data Conference and Code Sprint, that was staged over the 2-day period, 26 – 27 January 2012 at locations in Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and the Dominican Republic, with virtual participating nodes in Barbados and Cuba .

The broad objectives of the regional event were to:
  1. Sensitize various publics to the growing global open data movement as well as the issues,opportunities and potential gains for open data in the Caribbean. Key communities targeted were data gatherers, producers, processors and publishers; policy makers; regulators; executing agencies; academics; development-focused communities of practice and service providers.
  2. Present ICT students, innovators and entrepreneurs with the proposition of data-centric,development-focused applications as a viable and meaningful target of their attention.
  3. Demonstrate the application of data-centric, development-focused ICT solutions to contemporary local and regional problems.
  4. Simultaneously, across the Caribbean, bring together diverse communities of multi-sector,multidisciplinary, stakeholders and service agents as a microcosm of an open data ecosystem.
  5. Trigger some stakeholders to consider, and others to embrace, data openness as a central operating principle.
 The Conference website at http://developingcaribbean.org/ provides a variety of content relating to the event, including video excerpts, photos, Screen casts of Apps developed during the code sprint, etc.
A detailed report on the event can be found here - http://data.org.jm/DevelopingCaribbean_CountryReports.pdf.

Future Outlook
Open Data is a rapidly growing movement worldwide, spurred by the Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiative (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/), which has already seen over 50 countries as signatories to the principles and action plans of the Open Government charter. The English –Speaking Caribbean is expected to become an active part of this global community in the near future. The Caribbean Open Data conference will be an annual event, and we expect it to become the signature activity in the increasing momentum and importance of the Open Data movement in the Caribbean, as a driver of greater public sector transparency, improved service delivery andopen participative innovation.
We also expect the Caribbean Open Data conference to become an important contributor to the ongoing growth and maturation of the local and regional software developer community as a locus of innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. In this regard, we fully anticipate that the scope and footprint for the event will expand to more Caribbean countries in future stagings, with Barbados, Guyana, Cuba and Haiti being targeted for full participation in the upcoming 2013 edition. The established affiliation with the “Developing Latin America” event (http://desarrollandoamerica.org/) is an important value-adding partnership that will help to bring a further level of synergy and scalability to the Open Data/Developing the Caribbean event.