{"id":1195,"date":"2014-10-20T19:53:29","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T11:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.www.innovationiseverywhere.com\/?p=1195"},"modified":"2014-10-20T19:53:29","modified_gmt":"2014-10-20T11:53:29","slug":"best-condatos-top-open-data-event-latin-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/best-condatos-top-open-data-event-latin-america\/","title":{"rendered":"The best of ConDatos, the top Open Data event of Latin America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, a most important serie of Open Data events took place in Mexico City<\/strong>. The biggest megacity of the whole American continent was chosen to hold the second edition regional conference for Open Data: ConDatos<\/a><\/strong>, after the success of the 2013 edition in Uruguay.<\/p>\n

The main exhibition was enhanced by many parallel conferences, meetings, workshops and hackathons<\/strong>, with the objective of showing Latin American countries not only have joined the Open Data movement, but also have understood its potential and are decided to make use of it.<\/p>\n

\"condatos-mexico-open-data-latin-america-uruguay-top-tech-conference-big-data-in-south-america-louis-leclerc-innovation-is-everywhere-transparency-startups-emerging-markets-abrelatam\"<\/a><\/h2>\n

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ConDatos: A new conference on its way to earn a global reputation<\/h2>\n

Apart from the well-known Open Knowledge Festival<\/a>,<\/strong> very few are the Open Data events of this size, financially and logistically speaking. The organizers manifestly wanted to show the world that Latin America, and especially Mexico, had taken the Open Data turn.<\/p>\n

\"condatos<\/a><\/p>\n

Inauguration ceremony of ConDatos 2014<\/i><\/p>\n

The reunion took place in good standing cultural places: the Biblioteca Municipal de Mexico and the Cineteca Nacional, buildings that are big enough to gather 180 speakers, 1000 registered people, 15 sponsors<\/strong> (such as Google, IBM or Deloitte), and host 50 conferences on 2 days<\/strong>, according to the information provided by the organizers.<\/p>\n

And these data don\u2019t even take into account the numerous parallel events that took place during week<\/strong>. Workshops<\/a>, Hackathons<\/a>, \u201cdisconference<\/a>\u201d and other community meetings<\/a> which gathered developers, lawyers, lobbyists, aid workers, entrepreneurs and public officials.<\/p>\n

It clearly meant to be a complete review of the region\u2019s challenges and opportunities<\/b>, covering diversified themes such as economic development, mapping, journalism, privacy, health, environment, civic engagement, administrative transparency, international politics, data science or open licence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"condatos\"condatos<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

An example of Data Visualization from Mexico\u2019s national <\/i>Open Data portal<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0The finest to exhibit regional potential on Open Data matters<\/h2>\n

ConDatos<\/strong> gathered most of the international \u201ccr\u00eame de la cr\u00eame<\/i>\u201d on Open Data and Transparency (and also a bit of Open Source): Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Data Institute, Transparency International, Sunlight Foundation, Knight Foundation\u2026<\/strong> even some high representatives of public administrations Such as the OECD, Secretaries for digital transformation of Mexico, Chile, Uruguay….<\/p>\n

Obviously, all relevant local actors were here, such as Ciudadano Inteligente<\/a>, Desarrollando Am\u00e9rica Latina<\/a>, Argentina’s La Naci\u00f3n datablog<\/a>, Wingu<\/a>, and Codeando Mexico<\/a><\/strong>. Many of them attended an Open Knowledge Foundation meeting after the conference, the occasion to acknowledge\u00a0the importance of the Open Data community in Latin America<\/strong>: the mere Argentinian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation claims about 500 volunteers, and many local groups were represented, such as Costa Rica, Salvador, Mexico, and Brazil.<\/p>\n

Codeando Mexico<\/a>, the organization responsible for editing the first Open Data website in Mexico, told us about some of the very innovative features of their portal<\/strong>, showing a civil society initiative can be an interesting alternative to governmental portals<\/a>. Codeando Mexico\u2019s portal uses the OKFN\u2019s open source software: CKAN<\/a>, and integrates two made-in-google tools highly appreciated by any data user: Open Refine<\/a> and Google Big Query<\/a> (analysis of massive data).<\/p>\n

\"condatos<\/p>\n

Screenshot of DataMX, the Codeando Mexico\u2019s open data portal<\/i><\/p>\n

ConDatos 2014 has definitely shown that Latin America is bursting with energy when it comes to Open Data matters. The event is likely to earn a reputation<\/strong> after such a demonstration, and become a reference on the global level. Which will see next year in Santiago de Chile, where the 2015 edition will take place.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/h2>\n

Beyond the general optimism, reluctance to transparency and lack of startups<\/h2>\n

If there\u2019s clearly a shared optimism about the numerous Open Data initiatives and their potential to bring change and innovation, a few remarks can be made both about active transparency (governments intentionally liberating the data) and passive transparency (citizens asking for public information).<\/strong><\/p>\n

About active<\/strong> transparency<\/strong> first, most of Government\u2019s open data portals register only a few datasets. Salvador, for instance, only has 57 datasets<\/strong> on its portal<\/a> (as a comparison, there are more than 13.000 datasets published in France<\/a><\/strong>, and more than 150.000 on the <\/strong>US porta<\/strong>l<\/a>). Chile<\/a> does a bit better with about 1200 datasets, but Brazil\u2019s 350 datasets<\/a> don\u2019t look impressive considering the size of the country and the size of its administration. Argentina seems once again to be ahead: not only is has a furnished national open data website<\/a>, but two of its biggest cities have one: Buenos Aires<\/a> (26 datasets) and Bahia Blanca<\/a> (200 datasets).<\/p>\n

About passive transparency,<\/strong> a lot of the participants complained about the difficulty to access to public data<\/strong>, even where a transparency law exists. The administration regularly shows reluctance, through excessive paperwork or excessively long processes. In some countries, Open Data advocates even declare to fear retaliations if they ask for compromising data.<\/p>\n

\"condatos<\/a><\/p>\n

DataMarket<\/a>, a pioneer open data startup from Iceland<\/em><\/p>\n

Beside, startups seemed underrepresented<\/strong>. Although there were a few ones like Junar<\/a>, Socrata<\/a> and Grupo Inco<\/a>, almost every speaker was representing or an NGO, or a public entity, giving the impression that Open Data was only a dialogue between civil society and governments, leaving the private sector world out of it.<\/p>\n

In Europe, startups such as ScraperWiki<\/a> in the UK, Data Publica<\/a> in France or Spazio Dati<\/a> in Italy helped shaping the Open Data environment of their respective countries. We can only hope that a data startups movement will start to grow in Latin America, bringing their piece to the edification of a productive Open Data environment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, a most important serie of Open Data events took place in Mexico City. The biggest megacity of the whole American continent was chosen to hold the second edition regional conference for Open Data: ConDatos, after the success of the 2013 edition in Uruguay. The main exhibition was enhanced by many parallel conferences, meetings, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1470,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[55,52,49,51,80],"tags":[298,224,299,100,227,300,301,263,302,269,130,303],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-continents","category-events-innovators","category-innovators-category","category-markets-category","category-research-category","tag-argentine","tag-brazil","tag-costa-rica","tag-government","tag-latin-america","tag-mexico","tag-okfn","tag-open-data","tag-salvador","tag-south-america","tag-transparency","tag-uruguay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}