On Aug. 5, a group of open data mavens and government officials from Africa gathered in Washington, D.C., to launch an initiative called Africa Open Data. The goal was to help African countries tap open data as a means of addressing health, infrastructure and economic challenges. In a shocking turn of events, members of the Sierra Leone delegation simultaneously received text messages alerting them that their flight back home had been canceled due to the rapid spread of Ebola. Suddenly, they were citizens cut off from their country.
"They had looks on their faces of total panic, fear and trauma," recounts Steven Adler, IBM's open data evangelist and an organizer of the the event. On the spot, Steve and other participants started brainstorming ways they–and data–could help . They banged around ideas and began emailing and texting friends and associates they thought could lend a hand.
Like a pebble dropped in a lake, ripples from that event have spread around the world.
For one thing, it prompted Steve and others to immediately launch a new initiative, the Ebola Open Data Repository, aimed at gathering and cataloging data that might be useful to relief organizations, government agencies and policy makers who are grappling with the Ebola epidemic.
In parallel, our IBM Research Lab in Africa began collaborating with Sierra Leone's Open Data Initiative, Cambridge University's Data Voices project and local wireless telecom carriers to in a matter of days create s system for the government to engage directly with citizens about the crisis via sms or voice calls.
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