Egypt
Tarek is an Ambassador for Open Knowledge Egypt and works as a Computational Linguist. He completed his postgraduate studies in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in the UK. He is into Software Development, Open Data, and Open Access. Furthermore, he is a volunteer author in Global Voices Online, covering social and political events from the social media perspective.
Egypt ranked #79 in the 2014 Open Data Index / Other stories from Middle East
Last year I contributed to parts of the Index, but the majority of the work was done by Rayna. This year it was a much easier task, since there weren't many changes to the status of open data in Egypt. Nevertheless, I hope to see progress in the upcoming years as no progress is sometimes considered as regress when other countries are adopting openness more and more. In addition to checking whether last year’s datasets were still up, I also had to check whether they improved or newer datasets were added.
I believe the Global Open Data Index is very important for various reasons. One the one hand, it shows where each country stands and pinpoints the leading countries so that others can study and learn from their experience. On the other hand, and on a micro scale, it shows how each governmental entity in each country progresses across time. The Index, represented on a graph, serves as an icebreaker when speaking with someone about the importance of government openness, especially with the correlation between developed and developing countries and their rank in the Index.
P.S. One challenge is that sometimes variations of the scoring from one year to the other, and from one country to the other, can happen due to the different interpretation of the metrics for the different submitters. For sure, those will normally result in minor variations in the overall score, but those who use the Index for their analytics and advocacy work should take this into their consideration.
