17 Nov 2016

The land scape for research and data policies continuie to change around the world, according to Joint Minds Consult country managing partner for Botswana, Dr Patrick Molutsi.

Speaking at Botho University International Research conference in Gaborone on November 16, Dr Molutsi said around 2013/14, a global movement for open data called Research Data Alliance (RDA) was established.

“RDA was established to advocate for open data and new forms of research partnerships across governments, institutions and individual researchers or scientists, this will ensure researchers and innovators openly share data across technologies, and countries to address the grand challenges of society,” he said.

He further said research data was not only fragmented, but also expensive to have the one that was needed, hence the need to open data and had improved access to global data, something which would help enable researchers’ capacity to innovate and decision makers to have more options and choices based on readily available comparative data.

“To access data is not an easy job, it requires a revolution transition from government and the private sector,” he added said.

Dr Molutsi said Botswana’s data like other countries was closed, fragmented and highly underutilised by government, institutions and researchers.

“The system of open government is at rudimentary stages and the level of readiness by government to open data systems is very low,” he said.

Dr Molutsi said open data helped in reducing costs and improving efficiency as well as standardisation and elimination of data fragmentation that reduces data utility across disciplines, countries, institutions and researchers.

“What we are doing now is to produce a position paper on open data which will be discussed in a national conference on open data in March 2017,” Molutsi said.BOPA