Poverty and corruption are problems that developing countries fight everyday. Politicians andleaders abuse their influence to gain property and wealth by unacceptable means. Open data is away to challenge these problems and make a positive change in the society. Open data can be freely accessed, used, reused and re-distributed by anyone. Open development isabout providing the means for organizations to share open data. The process for open developmentin Uganda has just begun and there are many reasons to have an open development platform thatgathers open data, which the society demands when the government are not willing to share theirdata. The Uganda government denied invitation to join Open Government Partnership, that wouldmean a commitment to open development. This leaves non government organizations to take thefirst step to introduce open data to the society and other organizations. The Uganda OpenDevelopment Partnership Platform is an initiative by non government organizations that combinestheir knowledge to promote open development. The development of this platform has just begunand it needs further assistance to be ready for the public. The available data sets and documents onthe platform are released in proprietary formats, without the alternative of open formats. A portalfor open development that releases documents and data sets in proprietary formats alone aresomething that collides in the platform's purpose of being a portal for promoting openness. The purpose of this report is to promote open data with an overview about the subject and explainimprovement proposals on flaws in the Uganda Open Development Partnership Platform. Theinitiatives and organizations that practice open data can get initial guidelines from this report onhow to apply open data. The research should display the current state of the platform to identify theflaws and get an understanding how the platform works. The research was performed throughinterviews that were conducted in Kampala, Uganda, for three weeks in the beginning of 2013. Thisgave the chance to meet numerous citizens of this developing country which offered information ofinterest for the research. Observations were made by visiting the partners of the platform, in order tosee how they work with current means of visualization and to get an understanding of what can beimproved. The Uganda Open Development Partnership Platform can be improved with thepresented proposals to introduce the open license, multiple formats for material and structured datasets.

Since February 2019, the Kigali-based start-up Digital Umuganda has been coordinating the crowdsourcing of the first openly available voice dataset for Rwanda’s official language Kinyarwanda. This process originated from a pilot project of the Open Resources Incubator (ORI), an emergent service designed by GIZ staff and the author as consultant. ORI aims to facilitate the collective provision of open content, thereby affording previously inaccessible opportunities for local innovation and value creation. It promotes the community-based stewardship of open resources by (inter-)national actors who share responsibilities for their production, distribution and use. ORI’s pilot project cooperates with Mozilla’s team behind Common Voice, a platform to crowdsource open voice data, and has attracted Rwandan public and private actors’ interest in voice technology to improve their products and services.Informed by research on ICTs, datafication and big data in development discourses, and using the ICT4D approach ‘open development’ as its analytical lens, this thesis examines inherent conceptual aspects and socio-technical dynamics of the ORI pilot project. An in-depth analysis of qualitative data gathered through participant observation, interviews and focus groups explores assumed developmental benefits which international and Rwandan actors involved in the project associate with open voice data, power relations manifesting between these actors as well as underlying development paradigms.The analysis shows how the project established a global-local datafication infrastructure sourcing voice data from Rwandan volunteers via technically, legally and socially formalised mechanisms. By placing the dataset in the public domain, the decision as to how it will be used is left to the discretion of intermediaries such as data scientists, IT developers and funders. This arrangement calls into question the basic assumption that the open Kinya-rwanda dataset will yield social impact because its open access is insufficient to direct its usage towards socially beneficial, rather than solely profit-oriented, purposes. In view of this, the thesis proposes the joint negotiation of a ‘stewardship agreement’ to define how value created from the open voice data will benefit its community and Rwanda at large.