As part of efforts to grow the open data movement in Ghana, Mobile Web Ghana participated in the Kumusha Bus event which was hosted at the AITI-KACE last Saturday.
Kumusha Bus, an African adaption of the Libre Bus, was launched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in June 2014. The idea of the bus is to travel around a country for 6 days and stop along the way to engage with local communities and activate their interest and participation in Africa’s growing Open Movement.Local communities are activated through various interventions, including localised photo bombing, OER (Open Educational Resource) training at a local school, Wikipedia edit-a-thon, citizen journalism, Creative Commons open mic, or open movie sessions. The movements covered during Kumusha Bus could range from Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons, OSM (Open Street Map), GLAM, Open Data, OER (Open Educational Resource) to OKFN (Open Knowledge Foundation).
The event brought together developers, open-data advocates and some civil society organisations to interact and share ideas on growing the open-data movement in Ghana.
Speakers from participating organisations spoke about some of the projects that they are working on to promote open-data in Ghana.
Some projects promoting open-data in Ghana include: Ghana Open Data initiative, an open-data portal managed by NITA to promote open-government; Code4Ghana also focuses on promoting data-driven journalism and other initiatives by Wikipedia to open up Africa’s data.There were representatives from Wikipedia and Mozilla to speak about some of the tools promoting open data.