Katherine Reilly,Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver Canada and Paul Mungai, PhD Candidate in Information Systems at UCT will present the Department of Computer Science seminar with a talk entitled, "  Stewardship of Open Government Data?  The case of the Kenyan Open Data Initiative (KODI)". 

Abstract: Can we think about open government data from the point of view of stewardship?  Stakeholders often come together to design stewardship regimes for natural resources.  Finite resources produce competition which can undermine quality or availability, so in this case stewardship regimes are very important.  Open data, on the other hand, is widely reproducible, so the possibility of stewarding data resources is often overlooked.  In this talk we present our emerging ideas about stewardship of open government data, and share our initial findings about the extant and emergent stewardship regime of Kenya.  We hope to show that a stewardship lens causes us to think differently about open government data policies and practices. 

Katherine Reilly is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver Canada.  She is co-editor of Open Development: Networked Innovations in International Development (MIT Press, 2014) along Matthew Smith of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).  Her research explores ICT4D, media reform and international communications with a particular focus on Latin America.  She gravitates towards projects that allow her to theorize ‘border’ concepts, such as openness, communicative sovereignty and mediated geopolitics, as well as opportunities to reflect on social change through normative measures such as altmetrics, intersectionality and stewardship.

Paul Mungai is a PhD Candidate at the information systems department, University of Cape Town. His research focuses on the Kenya open data initiative, with the aim of understanding the underlying mechanisms and enabling structures that lead to its institutionalization. He is also studying the same case from a stewardship perspective.  He is a member of the Africa Open Data Collaboratives, which aims at increasing awareness and buy-in of open data through community driven initiatives. Twitter handle: @paulmungaiw.