Photo: flickr/jwyg

Accessing reliable data can be difficult, especially in the developing world. Good data might not exist in the first place, and if it does, it can be hard to come by or deliberately kept under lock and key by the powers-that-be. In Cambodia, an open data site is putting data in the hands of journalists and researchers – in fact, anyone who wants it – in an attempt to shine a light on a whole variety of issues.

Open Development Cambodia (ODC) is the first of its kind in southeast Asia. Launched in 2011, it makes a wide variety of information related to the country’s development easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

ODC was the brainchild of Terry Parnell, a long-time American resident of Cambodia. Parnell works with grassroots groups on issues such as the environment and human rights at the East-West Management Institute. Her job means she regularly receives information from people on the ground from all around the country. Because of this, she came into possession of a veritable treasure trove of data, which she wanted to share with others.

Terry Parnell. Photo: flickr/International Land Coalition

Parnell felt Cambodia, which had embarked on a path of rapid development after decades of civil war, needed a place where people could find unbiased data presented in a neutral fashion, without any kind of agenda.

“She didn’t want to tell people what to think, but just give them the information,” said Penhleak Chan, ODC’s research and volunteer coordinator. “It wasn’t about telling people what to do with the data, but to have their decisions informed by it.”

Open data

ODC is part of a burgeoning open data movement, whose goals are akin to other “open” movements, like open source or open content. The idea is to make certain data available to anyone and searchable and allow them to use and republish it as they wish without restrictions such as copyrights, fees, licenses or re-use limitations.

graphic: flickr/justgrimes

Many national governments have joined the open data movement, creating websites to publish much of the data they collect. A good list of open data catalogs can be found here.

Information in Cambodia is especially hard to come by. This is because many records were destroyed during the conflict and bloodshed that wracked the country for so long. Plus, most media outlets have tight links with the government and the information they present is often selectively used to back up a certain viewpoint (that is, when the media present bother presenting information at all).

While Cambodia is one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economies, incomplete and inconsistent data is hindering development. Add to that all the environmental and social challenges the country faces, and it’s not hard to see why journalists, activists, investors and others need to be able to get their hands on reliable information.

ODC’s data offering

ODC’s site features information on Cambodia’s laws and regulations, profiles of companies investing in the country, detailed briefings on economic sectors, oil and gas development, economic land concessions and natural resources. The site’s editors comb the local press and put article summaries and links to publications online five days a week.

The 12 staff members – web designers, editors, mappers and researchers – along with a handful of volunteers pull data from the Cambodian government, international organizations, the news media and research groups. The information sources are always presented, compared and contrasted with the goal of creating a data picture that is as accurate and transparent as possible.

One of ODC’s most popular features is a series of interactive maps with information ranging from forest cover change and election results to mining concessions and oil and gas blocks. The visuals allow users to select data sets they want to compare and find relationships between them.

Since its founding, the site has seen over 268,000 unique visitors from 203 countries. It averages over 35,000 page views per month. This more than doubled in July, when the ODC set up a series of special pages to cover controversial National Assembly elections, and more than 72,500 people came to the site.

Visitors include writers for The Guardian, TechPresident and for the New York Times. Groups such as the UN, the Mekong River Commission and the International Land Coalition have also accessed info to use in their research and presentation. And perhaps somewhat surprisingly, ODC staff has heard about the Cambodian government using the site.

The ODC team gets in the Christmas spirit

As ODC has become better known in Cambodia and beyond, it has started looking beyond its own borders. It’s cooperating with DW Akademie in January on a data journalism workshop (applications close December 31 – see here for more details). And a regional workshop earlier this year brought together open data fans from Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and China with the idea of starting an Open Development network and becoming sister sites.

But, staying true to the ODC philosophy, Penhleak Chan stressed that it’s up to the groups in each country to figure out for themselves how they want to do things. “We want to be a mentor for these groups, not tell them what to do,” she said.

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

News organisations worldwide are more often than not trying to answer these questions: which content management system is best for us? Should we develop a technical solution ourselves or should we use open software? Will this open system be flexible and innovative enough?

Sourcefabric says it has answers to those questions. This non-profit organisation is headquartered in Prague and develops open source software for newsrooms. The idea behind it is simple. Although a newsroom in Berlin can be totally different from one in Baghdad or Bangkok, all newsrooms function in a similar way regardless of their location. Any newsroom needs to gather, filter, publish and archive information.

Media organisations from Ghana to Switzerland and from Brazil to Belarus are using Sourcefabric’s opensource software such as Newscoop and Airtime. A network of developers worldwide are continuously refining their products. DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel spoke to Sourcefabric’s Adam Thomas about their software and why their tools and systems are proving successful in media organisations, particularly in developing countries.

There’re many different content management systems (CMS) out there. Why should a media organisation use Sourcefabric and not WordPress or Tumblr?

Well those are all great tools and we’ve learned a lot from them. Newscoop specifically is made by journalists and for journalists, so we work in a real true core development mode, where we’re bringing together programmers and journalists to build the tool that they want to use. So Newscoop has a lot of things that are very specific for journalism, it has a very powerful media archive which deals with video, audio, images and maps very well. It can handle maps and build up data sets around a location. Obviously, it allows you to do things like subscribers and paywalls, which is very important too for media organisations. The workflows set up within it are designed for journalists to a certain extent. We understand that there’re different types of journalists and there’re different permissions, some are chief editors, some are editors and some are just journalists. We’ve really worked with journalists to try and hone a platform with Newscoop that can be used in a lot of different news scenarios.

What are the risks of using your CMS? What happens if Newscoop suddenly gets discontinued just as Posterous did ?

Newscoop itself has been around since 1998, so it has a long history. Even if we stopped making Newscoop tomorrow, there’re hundreds of news organisations who are using Newscoop and who are contributing to its development. So even if that happened, you’d still be part of a large community that could work on these things on their own if they want and still carry on developing it. What’s important is that you can install it on your own server if you have a technical team. You then control your own data – and this is different from Posterous or other services that are web-based and where you are giving your data to a third party. These services actually own your data to a large extent and they can sell your data too. This is not the case with Sourcefabric. We can host it for you if you don’t have the technical capacity to do this, we have very open and transparent ways to do this. We allow you to have control over your data and we don’t own it at any point.

There’re hundreds of organisations using your software, so does that make it complicated for a news organisation to get proper service for your software?

Because the code is open-source, there’s nothing to stop you from modifying the code yourself and making your own features. But the nature of the open-source license is that these changes should go back into the original code and therefore benefit other people. If you have your own development team, that’s fantastic. But if you really don’t have a potential for that, you can join our worldwide community and benefit from having the expertise and feedback from hundreds of people.

Adam Thomas: “News organisation are not competing with each other but with the internet”

My central hypothesis is that newsrooms all over the world are unique, but there’re certain things that make them identical. If we understand what these things are, we can help our users work together to build better tools. Essentially, the way that newsrooms are the same is the way that they work. They all have to do with planning assignments, they all have to do information gathering and verification, they are all publishing it somewhere and the are all archiving. If you understand that process, it allows you to build better tools that help news organisations.

What too many news organisations do, is that they focus on the output first and foremost. They say: “We need a website”, “We want an iPad journal”, “We need an iPhone app”, “We want to make a radio station”. Fundamentally, that’s not important. What you have to do is look at the way that your newsroom works, who your sources are, what kind of information are they giving you and how you can verify that information. Then you look at publishing it and where that needs to go best. So if you are starting with an idea of doing a website, that doesn’t work. But if you start with thinking about what makes you unique from other kinds of news organisations, then you isolate the really important things that allow people like Sourcefabric and other organisations to develop really great tools for you.

Aren’t you afraid that in the future news organisations will just look all the same, using the same tools and the same apps?

Absolutely no. We try to divorce content to a certain extent from how it is outputted. The content that is being passed around the newsroom is just a story. It can have video, audio or pictures, but, essentially, it’s a story. Once you understand this, it becomes very easy to change what this looks like on any given web platform. No two websites look the same. Design can be completely different. But processes and workflows are the same. By making it easier and more streamline, you can spend more time working on the design, doing market research and finding out who your audience are, evaluating what’s working.

Many people say: “collaboration is the future, no media organisation can manage the change on its own”. It looks like you are working in this direction as well.

I really hope so. I think we’re pioneering a way of working that really focuses on building communities around news, but also around technology. Traditionally, news organisations competed with each other for the attention of the audience. Now, news organisation are not competing with each other but with the internet. They’re competing with Twitter and Facebook. Therefore it’s very important that they start working together. This can be building tools, cooperating with newsrooms that have certain specialities to cover stories better, it can also be working together to spread news. If you are a local news organisation, you don’t need to have a person in Washington and a person in Moscow, but you can rather partner with other local organisations there and share content. It benefits both of you, you’re not in direct competition, but you actually get more content and more value for your readers. It means people are more likely to come back to your site because you provide real quality for your audience. That involves collaborating on technology, but also the gathering and production of news as well.

What’s the next step for Sourcefabric?

We’re working very hard on a tool called Superdesk which is taking 10-15 years of experience we have at working in newsrooms. We are trying to build a newsroom content management tool. It’s not just about publishing to the web in a traditional CMS sense, but rather managing the workflow of newsrooms, the people and stories inside it and the information that is being gathered. It’s built in such a way that you can build apps on top of the framework. It’s more of a platform that allows you to shape your own business strategy. We’re working on building our own apps for this. We have a live blog app that is allowing news organisations to blog live events very quickly adding social media and things like this. We’re actively looking to work with other news partners to develop new apps, this could be in the field of radio or in the field of data, there’re a lot of possibilities. The core thing is that we have a platform that is very adaptable, it’s very open and we have lots of people working on it. Right now, we’re working on a beta prototype of that.