Despite the summer heat and vacation schedules, conversations about the Data Revolution have been lively over the past few months. This has been particularly the case in the context of the UN launch of its Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution on August 29th. Below is a list of blogs and articles we have collected to highlight some of the major ideas over the past few months on how to revolutionize the way data are collected and used around the world. If the list is missing a blog or article, please contact ODW and watch this space for periodic updates.
15 September 2014
Claire Melemand and Amanda Glassman are interviewed about the Data Revolution on the Development Drums Podcast. They discuss the need for a data revolution, difficulty in doing a cost-benefit on the data revolution, big data and other topics. …(more)
11 September 2014
Publish What You Fund’s Jeannet Lingan discusses the Independent Expert Advisory Group in a blog post. They provide three recommendations for the group: 1) Focus on access to information 2) Focus on users of information 3) Draw on new technologies to build transparency and accountability. …(more)
10 September 2014
The Economist published an article entitled “Working Hours: A plea for more data”. It looks mostly at the research on the time-use surveys but suggests that these data can and should be much better around the world. …(more)
10 September 2014
CAFOD’s Neva Frecheville wrote a blog post called “Welcome to the Data Revolution Advisory Group – but will it be a revolution driven by people?” The post includes three recommendations for the group: 1) Be open to learning non-traditional data collection methodologies 2) Include an expert who will champion grassroots perspective 3) Give enough time for civil societies to consult marginalized groups. …(more)
10 September 2014
Norman Shamas on the Tech Change blog writes a blog post “What the Data Revolution means for global development and M&E”. …(more)
9 September 2014
Alaina Levine writes a blog post on the World Economic Forum titled “How the data revolution will change the world.” The article talks about how the internet, big data, and data scientists are changing technology and the way business and governments make decisions. …(more)
9 September 2014
Casey Dunning, Alan Gelb and Sneha Raghavan of the Center for Global Development publish a policy paper entitled “Birth Registration, Legal Identity and the Post-2015 Agenda.” The paper makes the case that improved CRVS systems should be part of the data revolution. …(more)
8 September 2014
The Guardian Development Professionals Network featured an article titled “Why gender disaster data matters: ‘In some villages, all the dead were women’. It discusses the need for gender disaggregated data to understand inequality that emerges in disaster settings. …(more)
2 September 2014
An article in the Fijian newspaper, The Jet, discusses the need for better statistics in Small Island Developing States. It includes a call for a data revolution. …(more)
2 September 2014
Prof Martin Hilbert of UC-Davis published an article on SciDevNet titled “The ultimate limitation of big data for development”. He cautions against depending too heavily on forecasting models in development because the goal of development is to depart from past trends in society. …(more)
1 September 2014
Henri Verdier publishes a post on his blog entitled “Open Data and Democracy”. He asks questions about the potential and limitations of data, including a discussion of the data revolution and democracy. …(more)
1 September 2014
Tobias Denskus wrote a blog post titled “The UN’s technocratic answer to the ‘Data Revolution’’. He argues that the UN IEAG is too homogenous and should include more journalists, grassroots workers, and communications people. …(more)
29 August 2014
The UN Independent Expert Advisory Group is announced. …(more)
21 August 2014
“The ‘X-file’ and the need for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics systems post-2015” A blog post on post2015.org by Laura Rodriguez Takeuchi about the extent to which MDG data are estimates. She argues that better CRVS systems need to be developed. …(more)
19 August 2014
“Africa Lacks Autonomous Statistics Bodies, Says Report” A SciDevNet.com article on the report by Glassman and Co-authors. This article focuses primarily on the lack of independence of NSOs. …(more)
18 August 2014
“Data Revolution from the Bottom Up” A blog post by Amanda Glassman on post2015.org. She discusses how the data revolution expert group’s recommendations could inspire change from countries going up, rather than from international organizations. …(more)
15 August 2014
“Africa Makes Inroads in Open Development Data” An article on SciDevNet.com about how AfDB and others are working to improve data access and availability. …(more)
14 August 2014
“The Data Revolution will fail without a praxis revolution” A blog post on ICTs for Development by Richard Heeks. He argues that a data revolution is only a relatively small part of the process of having better results. …(more)
13 August 2014
“Why Africa Needs a Data Revolution” A blog post at the World Economic Forum blog by Amanda Glassman. She describes the incentives and policy design that influence data quality and availability. …(more)
12 August 2014
“The Data Revolution: Orwellian nightmare or boon to people power?” was published to the post2015.org blog by David McNair of the ONE organization. He suggests that the issues raised in the Foreign Policy article can be largely addressed by implementing the suggestions of the Data Revolution Expert’s Workshop and the recommendations from Glassman and co-authors. …(more)
9 August 2014
“Ory Okolloh: ‘Transparency advocates must learn from gay rights movement” This article in the Guardian’s Global Development page includes an interview about transparency and openness. Ms. Okolloh argues that transparency advocates should get support from government officials first and then the public will follow. She also argues that it will take lawyers and media and the judiciary to get useful data and real transparency. …(more)
4 August 2014
“Why African Stats are So Often Wrong” a blog post from Amanda Glassman and Justin Sandefur for the Center for Global Development about their paper on the political economy of bad statistics. …(more)
August 2014
“The Social Laboratory” by Shane Harris at Foreign Policy Magazine describes efforts by engineers and technocrats in Singapore to use big data to better control dissent, reduce disorder, and find technical solutions to governance problems. …(more)
31 July 2014
“Towards A Strategy for the Data Revolution: Outcomes from the July 11 – 12 Experts’ Workshop” is published. …(more)
30 July 2014
“What if everything we know about poor countries’ economies is totally wrong” A Vox.com interview with Prof. Morten Jerven about data quality in developing countries and the role of the IMF and World Bank in data quality. …(more)
30 July 2014
“Africa’s ‘sluggish data collection needs a revolution'” article published on Scidevnet.com The article focuses primarily on article published by Amanda Glassman and co-authors and focuses on incentives changes to improve data quality from NSOs and the need for independent NSOs. …(more)
29 July 2014
On a blog post at the World Bank entitled “Measuring Poverty and Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Knowledge Gaps and Ways to Address Them”, Stephen Glasen notes that the quality of surveys in many countries remains sub-par. Part of the solution, he says is capacity building for NSOs. …(more)
25 July 2014
“Smart aid for the World’s poor” A Wall Street Journal article about the need to pare down the post-2015 goals, is particularly critical of a goal to improve gender statistics. The Copenhagen Consensus Center looked at the different proposed goals and decided that there would be little value for money to boosting gender statistics relative to other goals. …(more)
15 July 2014
“The Political Economy of Bad Data” paper published by Amanda Glassman and Justin Sandefur at Center for Global Development. It discusses how incentives can sometimes be misaligned for NSOs to produce inaccurate statistics. …(more)
9 July 2014
The World Resources Institute publishes a working paper “Indicators of a Sustainable Agriculture”. A call for better data is among their recommendations. …(more)
8 July 2014
Amanda Glassman and Alex Ezeh co-authored a blog post for the Center for Global Development titled “Delivering on the Data revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa” which summarizes their report by the same name. …(more)
8 July 2014
On the Global Prosperity Wonkcast at the Center for Global Development, Lawrence MacDonald interviewed Amanda Glassman about the publication of the Delivering on the Data Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa report published by the Data for African Development Group. …(more)
8 July 2014
“Delivering on the Data Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa” published on the Center for Global Development website. …(more)