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Partnering for Open Data

From markets to governance, decisions are best made with information that is timely and transparent. And yet, across disaster risk management (DRM) cycle, most data is unavailable to decision-makers. Too often the information necessary to support proper understanding of disaster and climate risk is fragmented across different government ministries, the private sector or international organizations and therefore not able to be fully utilized in the challenge of building resilience. There is a strong need to establish partnerships amongst all parties in order to link data from risk modeling to risk reduction, early warning, response, and recovery so that decision makers can work under less uncertainty and with greater understanding of risk.

For the past two years, the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction (GFDRR) has built partnerships in 20 countries around open data, aimed at improving a client’s ability to model risk and increase resilience of a society. This project, called Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI), has provided a suite of open-source technical platforms for data collection and integration as well as the governance models for curating and managing those data. In Indonesia, a geodatabase now provides risk data on hundreds of thousands of structures, which were put onto the map through voluntary eorts in participatory mapping and can be used by all ministries and cities for disaster risk reduction. In Nepal, volunteers are now replicating this work in one of the most at-risk countries for a major earthquake.

In the next phase of the OpenDRI program, GFDRR is seeking to enlist its partners around expanding the open data ecosystem around the whole DRM cycle. As a first step, GFDRR is partnering with leading organizations in this field to develop a eld guide around open data for resilience. We would like to invite you to participate in building this compilation of case studies, best practices, and lessons learned. In the initial stages of this research, GFDRR would like to nd out where information would help drive better decisions for you and your clients around the DRM cycle, including risk modeling, investments in disaster risk reduction and recovery.