The Caribbean Open Institute

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Project Title	Project Scope / Description	Application
Establish the Caribbean School of Data	Building sustainable open data infrastructures and enabling the effective use of Open Data in the Caribbean, requires organizations from all sectors (public, private, media, civil society) to invest in staff and community capacity across the whole open data value-chain, including skills for: supplying open data; using open data; and understanding, analyzing, and mobilizing data to create change. Similar and complementary skill-sets are required across the rapidly expanding data ecosystem, including Big data, private data, and crowd-sourced data. This Strategic initiative will pursue a range of activities including: 1. Adopt/adapt the International School of Data model to establish a distinctive "Caribbean School of Data", hosted at the Mona School of Business & management, UWI and affiliate institutions in other countries across the Caribbean (beginning with Cuba and St. Lucia, and Guyana) 2. Incorporate a range of Data literacy programs targeting Private Sector enterprise, that includes Data management, data integration and big data analytics offerings 3. Adopt a virtual incubation model to encourage and facilitate Data-driven entrepreneurial startups 4. Develop a sustainable Data Journalism fellowship program and community for Journalists 5. Build a Caribbean data competency map to identify and make searchable & accessible, individual and institutional clusters of skills, knowledge and capabilities in the region 6. Identify opportunities to progressively integrate data competency into the formal educational curriculum of schools, colleges & universities		Read More...
Towards a Data-Driven Agriculture Sector in Jamaica	Over the last two years, the Rural Agricultural Development Authority, the SlashRoots Foundation and the Mona School Of Business & Management have collaborated to explore how open data principles could be applied to the most pressing challenges in Jamaican Agriculture sector. Central to this work has been need to overcome structural constraints in resource availability and scale necessary to catalyzing a more data-driven agricultural sector in Jamaica. This strategic initiatives seeks to apply emergent best practice on government digital services and an evolving theory of change for how data collaborations facilitated by shared open infrastructure can enable access to and the creation of high quality agricultural data assets and information services. The outcomes of the initiative would aid in the closing of existing data gaps, improve the information available to actors throughout the agricultural sector and exploring the implications an increasing digital and connected public service on data privacy and ownership.	http://harvestapi.io	Read More...
Visualizing the structure and inkages in the Jamaican economy using National Statistics (Administrative Data)	The sectors of the economy are all linked together as portions of the output in one sector is consumed in another. The Input-Output (IO) Table analyses the Jamaican economy by showing the value of goods and service that are produced within each sector and how much of that which is produced is consumed locally in production and by consumers and that which is exported. The table also distributes the total import bill to the various sectors of the economy. Other “Supply and Use tables” collected from surveys and administrative sources, such as Labour Force, Education, Census, Housing and Trade collectively reflect the structural dynamics of the Jamaican economy. However much of this statistical information only presented as tabular data in a highly aggregated format, and in some cases and is only produced periodically (eg. the last I/O Table was produced in 2007). Making this source data openly accessible and combined with visualization techniques can make this information much more impactful, accessible and with greater utility for business decision-makers and policy makers. This initiative will use these various sources of statistical data to create a visual map representation of the structural dynamics of the Jamaican economy that enhances the visibility and utility of this data and also creates additional re-use opportunities for other innovators through open APIs. The Initiative will also explore the potential of big data" sources such as anonymized electricity consumption and mobile traffic / location data as a basis for proxy indicators to augment official statistics.		Read More...
Open Data and Interactive Community Mapping: Empowering Local Community Tourism	As the global tourism landscape evolves, there is an emerging market for an alternative tourism product that is heritage-, cultural- or nature-based and thrives on visitor-community interaction, exploration and exchange. This so-called community-based tourism creates opportunities for empowering local communities as sustainable businesses, by developing, marketing and exposing their natural culture, talents, passion and potential to the world and is a key component of Jamaica’s sustainable tourism future. This project will combine official government open data with crowdsourced interactive map data and indigenous content produced in local communities to enhance the visibility and inclusiveness of community tourism. The goal is ultimately to help community members working in collaboration with government agencies, civil society organizations (CSOs), and development partners to harness the collective wisdom, knowledge and initiative of these communities to play a greater participatory role as drivers of community development. The specific initiative will target 2 Pilot communities as Proof of Concepts.		Read More...
Open Data in the Caribbean: Creating Possibilities and Opportunities for increased Access, Collaboration and Innovation	Provides a platform for expanding the OpenData initiatives in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The Overall Goal of the Project is to contribute to the development of the Caribbean Knowledge Economy though open data initiatives that support policy oriented research networks in the region, and involves the following primary components: • building institutional capacity to promote, facilitate and provide sustainable support for OpenData policy, standards and initiatives across the region • supporting the field deployment of open data initiatives emerging from the earlier pilot project in Agriculture, and extending actions to other information sectors (local & regional) • developing a research agenda that investigates and informs the use and impact of Open Data in the Caribbean	http://caribbeanopeninstitute.org	Read More...
Digijam 2.0 Sportshackathon	The purpose of this project is to facilitate the SportsHackathon by: a) Developing an Open Data Webservices API that enables software developers to access Jamaican sports data relating to the major national sports of track & field, football, cricket and netball, for use and re-use in the development of novel web and mobile applications b) Conducting an Ideation process to crowd-source the problems and opportunities that exists within the various sporting sectors as well as educate stakeholders on the potential of technology to solve problems	SportsData API http://sportsapi.data.org.jm	Read More...
mFisheries Research project - Trinidad & Tobago	mFisheries is developing capacity in the Caribbean to pursue opportunities arising from the provision of innovative mobile-enabled services for its poor communities, and providing related empirical data and analysis to inform Caribbean policy and regulation. mFisheries focuses its attention on the small scale fisheries industry in the Caribbean, with particular emphasis on Trinidad and Tobago.	http://cirp.org.tt/mfisheries/	Read More...