"Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact of open data, however, focuses on high-income countries. Much less is known about open data’s role and value in low- and m ... iddle-income countries, and more generally about its possible contributions to economic and social development. Open Data for Developing Economies features in-depth case studies on how open data is having an impact across the developing world-from an agriculture initiative in Colombia to data-driven healthcare projects in Uganda and South Africa to crisis response in Nepal. The analysis built on these case studies aims to create actionable intelligence regarding: (a) the conditions under which open data is most (and least) effective in development, presented in the form of a Periodic Table of Open Data; (b) strategies to maximize the positive contributions of open data to development; and (c) the means for limiting open data’s harms on developing countries." (Publisher description) more

"In this report, developed with support from Facebook, we focus on an approach to extract public value from social media data that we believe holds the greatest potential: data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership in which actors from different secto ... rs exchange information to create new public value. Such collaborative arrangements, for example between social media companies and humanitarian organizations or civil society actors, can be seen as possible templates for leveraging privately held data towards the attainment of public goals. Existing research on data collaboratives is sparse, but a number of recent examples show how social media data can be leveraged for public good. These include Facebook’s sharing of population maps with humanitarian organizations following natural disasters; predicting adverse drug reactions through social media data analysis in Spain; and the city of Boston’s use of crowdsourced data from Waze to improve transportation planning. These examples and 9 additional cases are discussed in the full report. By assessing these examples, we identify five key value propositions behind the use of social media data for public goals: 1. Situational awareness and response; 2. Knowledge creation and transfer; 3. Public service design and delivery; 4. Prediction and forecasting; 5. Impact assessment and evaluation." (Pages 6-7) more