Francesca Perucci, Chief of Development Data and Outreach Branch at the UN Statistics Division, opens the event with a keynote emphasizing that many good investments to report on the Sustanable Development Goals might be wasted if countries don’t adopt open data practices.
Jamison Crowell, Open Data Manager at Open Data Watch, presents ODIN 2020/21’s main findings, including that “progress on open gender data is improving, but not as fast as non-gender data” and the “most progress on open data is being made in the Caribbean and many parts of Africa.”
Akrom Sulatnov, Department Head of Open Data Portal at UzStat (Uzbekistan) discusses how the country’s president became a proponent of open data.
Burt Collymore, Database Systems Engineer from the Central Statistical Office (St. Lucia), describes the dedication of his team and the efforts they made to see a 44 point improvement in ODIN scores this year.
Iwan Sno, Director of the General Statistics Bureau (Suriname), passionately expresses the importance of open data, the challenges they faced, and creative solutions they used to overcome them.
Ruth Minja, Principal Statistician of the National Bureau of Statistics (Tanzania), talks about their future plans to conduct open data trainings, and improve data accessibility and interoperability.
Latifa Alshehhi, Head of Smart Data Section at the Federal Competitiveness Statistics Centre (United Arab Emirates), states that “Data is an asset. It is essential to learn how we can leverage it and build more robust policies to support open science and research to improve our citizens’ lives.”
Eric Swanson, Director of Research at Open Data Watch and creator of ODIN, closes the event by discussing how ODIN has evolved into a collaborative effort, strengthened by exchanges and feedback from statisticians around the world which makeup the “spirit” of ODIN.
