Bantay Kita launches data portal; holds open data workshops

As part of its commitment to the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) international Data Extractors Program, Bantay Kita (BK) has soft launched its "Demanding for Action, Transparency, and Accountability (DATA) Portal" in Cebu City last July 13 during the Open Government Partnership CSO participation capacity building.

The DATA Portal was developed by BK's research and communications officer drawing from his background in open data and transparency initiatives. The portal, as he describes it, is aimed at becoming a one-stop shop for data on mining, oil and gas industries for civil society organizations in the Philippines.

The portal currently hosts information on mining tenements, data visualizations on minerals extracted per province and also project level data which were sourced from Philippine Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (PH-EITI) reports. More data will be added as soon as they are cleaned and made available.

To generate demand for the portal, BK has been conducting open data workshops around the Philippines to gather feedback using the "data user story template" which is a simple tool used to gauge data needs of BK's CSO members. The tools asks workshop participants what advocacy they are working on; who their decision maker or audience is; and what data they would need to arrive at the outcome they are working on. This ensures that data in the portal is not just specific to communities but also relevant to their respective advocacies and needs as a community.

The portal and its approach was recently presented in Madrid, Spain during the International Open Data Conference.

For more info about the DATA Portal, go to: www.data.bantaykita.ph or read this blog about the portal.