Back in September, the School of Data conducted a training for CSOs working with election data in cooperation with Perludem and supported by The Asia Foundation. The training was the kick off of an initiative aiming to create a community of Indonesian CSOs that are interested in working with data to strengthen their advocacy strategy. This is how the Open Data Club was born in the end of October.

Meetup of Open Data Club of CSOs in Jakarta

The Open Data Club membership was open for all CSO interested in working with data. Right now the meetings are concentrated in Jakarta but as the community gaining more momentum it will try to do the meetup in other cities as well. Need to be noted that this is might the first data-related community of CSOs, so this is a great start for data awareness for CSO in Indonesia. Right now there are more than 10 organizations took part in the meetups, including some goverments and funders.

The first meetup, initiated by Perludem, had quite a mixed group, ranging from CSOs, goverment, and other data focused movements. However the focus is still on how to use data for advocacy, a theme that CSOs are very interested in. There was a lot of talking about how CSOs can get data, manage and analyse it and finally use it to for storytelling and evidence based campaigning in the form of infographics or interactive apps. One important point that also has been raised is how CSOs can collaborate and potentially combine their data and push more for knowledge sharing and collective advocacy.

The Open Data Club became a weekly meetup in which the participating CSOs take turns in hosting the event. This means that they all visit the offices of all participants CSOs and get to know each other a little better. One more interesting thing is that the CSOs are starting to bond and create action plans (called bubbles) of things they want to achieve through the meetups. By doing this, hopefully after several meetups there will something concrete that the Open Data Club can create and build together.

The Open Data Club marks something quite important for CSO in Indonesia. It shows that interest and awareness on working with data is gaining ground in Indonesia and the CSOs are starting to collaborate and work together for the greater good. Let’s hope this great community can create great things in the future!