Abstract

Crowdsourcing Solutions to Improve Data Accuracy and Re-Use in Kenya
Track: Aid and Development
Authors: Qiyang Xu

International organizations and governments are launching open data initiatives with impressive speed, making their information publicly available via electronic portals for citizens, companies and civil society to re-use. This provokes three interrelated questions. To what degree is this open data accurate? What are the implications of data inaccuracy for the efficacy of open data initiatives? Finally, to what extent can initiatives leverage crowdsourcing to improve the validity of open data? Organized in four parts, this paper provides an overview of open data; an analysis of the accuracy of geo-location coordinates in two education and health datasets available on Kenya's Open Data portal (opendata.go.ke); a description of the design process of a crowdsourcing tool to draw upon the contribution of citizens to improve open geospatial data; and an elaboration of lessons learned and implications of relevance to future open data and crowdsourcing initiatives.