In early September, I participated in a workshop together with the Publish What You Pay Indonesia (PWYP Indonesia) coalition, a collection of CSO working for transparency in the extractive industries, and supported by the South East Asia Technology and Transparency Initiative (SEATTI). We focused on how to create and leverage transparency in the extractive industries based on open data and what is the best way to do it – or, the EIOpenData movement.

The workshop provided an introduction to the world of open data, and we looked at how to work with data to create transparency and openness in the extractive industries. It started off with a session from the Indonesian Information Commission on actually how people can create Freedom of Information requests (FoI), which is a useful way to get data from public bodies. Afterwards, the discussion continued with a representative from the Presidential Unit for monitoring, control, & oversight (UKP4) talking about their new plans regarding the Indonesia Data Portal and how they plan to support transparency.The attendance of speakers from the government clearly showed that there is buy-in from the Government of Indonesia (GoI) to support transparency and data use in Indonesia, which is very exciting.

Following directly after that was a panel discussion where I talked about the data pipeline and how to work with data, together with a representative from PWYP Indonesia who talked about Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) data, which is an international movement that push for transparency in extractive industries domain, especially budget data. We were also joined by a representative from the Web Foundation to talk about open data solutions.

The discussion that followed was an exciting one. We brainstormed ideas about how to work with data and open data to strengthen advocacy in the extractive industries side, with very active participants. They were interested in how they can actually use data to help in their cause for advocacy. The world of data and data usage especially for advocacy in Indonesia is very new, so workshops like this, with the goal of raising awareness of data use among CSOs, are hugely beneficial to the Indonesian community.