Government-led, Citizen-owned: #HackJak2015

This month, Making All Voices Count together with the Jakarta City Government, concludes #HackJak2015 – a combination of scrapathon, hackathon and visualthon that aims to make government data publicly available, so that ordinary people can find out just what their government is doing on their behalf.

The city government has been working with civil society, the media and NGOs to refine what the key ‘problem statements’ are, and have opened government data to hackers, coders and graphic designers who will submit their ideas on how to use data to achieve more transparent and accountable governance.

Fahmi Islami from Jakarta City Government with the HackJak group

Who’s responsible?: the emergence of government-led transparency projects

This article in The Guardian discusses how the city of London is lauded for its open data initiatives, and argues that government can be both a facilitator and, at times, a self-reflective leader in transparency initiatives.

Sometimes, the provision of data by government is enough, but Andrew Collinge, Assistant Director of intelligence and analysis at the GLA (Greater London Assembly), writes :

It’s a time for city governments to be much more deterministic about data. You need to provide people with datasets, but also say what government wants to do with it.

And that is exactly what HackJak2015 does.

Fahmi Islami from Jakarta City Government with the HackJak group

What’s next?

Over the course of this week, we’ll be documenting the final push in the three HackJak competitions, looking at how those who took part have found working with the data, the government and each other to transform the concept of Open Data into something tangible, workable and useful for ordinary citizens

After the competition, the winners will be offered mentoring and funds to develop and build the app, in consultation with the Jakarta City Government – and HackJak will be watching to see what works, what doesn’t, and how we can learn from this competition’s example.