As well as this event in London, a paralel hack day was held with the same data set in Cape Town, South Africa and a companion event will be happening in Lagos, Nigeria at the same time. The seperate locations will offer different perspectives to the data and identify a variety of solutions and prototypes.
How the Data Challenge came about
The UK Aid Transparency Guarantee (ATG) pledged to publish detailed information about the Department for International Development's (DFID) aid projects, in a way that can be understood by both UK citizens and citizens in poor countries. Stateing that “we will allow anyone to reuse our information, including to create new applications which make it easier to see where aid is being spent”.
In order to encourage and foster the innovative reuse of this information, and to facilitate better understanding of the information we release, DFID is holding a DFID Data Challenge “hack day” to get those interested in reusing DFID data to work with us for a weekend building prototype applications and exploring what can be done with the data. The event will also give us the opportunity to listen to ideas proposed by others that may influence our future thinking on transparency.
