DOfE – Data Open for Everyone

Background

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Our world is becoming more and more data driven. Almost every decision made by businesses, governments, public institutions, and other relevant organizations is nowadays based on some form of data.  Many of these decisions, especially in the area of politics and economy, influence lives of many people and sometimes even whole countries. In particular, in the time of the CoVid pandemic, data about number of cases, incidence, and mortality rates were used extensively to regulate anti-pandemic measures. But also beyond the pandemic, the politics and economy – and consequently our lives – are driven by data such as inflation, unemployment rate, or increase of average temperature. In addition, political parties and media are often using data to argue their beliefs and views and to influence public opinion.

 

Therefore, it is important that reliable and objective data that influence our everyday life are accessible and understandable for everyone [1]! Many governments all around the world understood it and drives open data initiatives [2]. For example, in Germany you can access almost 80,000 data sets via GOVDATA portal that was created by the German government [3].

 

While open data can be accessed by everyone, the sources of open data are often scattered – especially when we are talking about local data – and the data itself is barely understandable for an average citizen since they are often stored in cryptical csv files and tables. This reduces drastically the transparency of the open data and make it less “open” for an average citizen.

 

At MI4People we want to change this status quo and have recently started a new project called DOfE – Data Open for Everyone!

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Project Goal

 

To create a portal that gathers, consolidates, harmonizes, visualizes, and explains various relevant data such as inflation, unemployment rate, average temperatures over the years etc. from various sources all over Germany. Thereby, try to gather data at high as possible granularity level to be able to depict local differences around Germany and German countries and present and explain these data in such a way that it is easily understandable for an average citizen without special education.

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Expected Impact

 

This system will create a better transparency with regard to data-driven political decision making processes and formulation of public opinion. It will help citizens to better understand the foundation of the decision-making processes in a data-driven world and will contribute to democratization of data. It can also be used by organizations, authorities, and media to get quick access to relevant reliable data.

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Project Phases

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• Phase 1: In this phase we will create the first MVP of the platform that will include data like Inflation, Unemployment rate, Population, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), GDP Per Capita, CO2 Emission, and Weather Data for various German countries.

• Phase 2: Collect user feedback and add further data. Also increase granularity level of the data.

• Phase 3: Continuously add new data sources and improve the platform.

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Current Status

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Phase 2 is running.

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MVP: https://dofe-mi4people.streamlit.app/

Github Repo: https://github.com/PaulSpringerMI4People/germany_dash

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