Today is Open Data Day 2019 and our OpenAsterisk team is meeting to discuss the next steps and development roadmap for our opendata portal.

In the next couple of years, how smartly a community utilises data will play a key role in its prosperity and wellbeing. Data enables us to continuously improve via a never ending understand, measure and optimise cycle. The first step towards making that happen is to open data, code and citizen facing service procedures. It's bound to improve governance and service delivery for citizens.

Whilst opening up of data, code and service delivery is great, but it should not be at the cost of releasing confidential data that may adversely cause harm, by putting people, assets or our national interest at risk.

Code for Pakistan's initiative of OpenAsterisk is a step toward facilitating government do just that; i.e. safely making its data public without putting anyone or anything at risk. Our team of super volunteers for opendata portal; Shaji Ahmad, Sumayya Shaheen, Usman Yasin and Ayesha Akhtar, are building an online web portal to host, but not limited to, Islamabad Capital Territory Administration's publicly available data. The portal aims to host any datasets that citizens may find useful. Opendata portal is based on the popular CKAN framework which is being used by other governments and entities for sharing their data with public. It is a work in progress at the moment but we hope to share its launch details very soon.

Data alone has no real value until people start utilising it for trend analysis and understanding behavioural patterns that then establish baseline metrics for service delivery. We hope that post launch, useful infrastructure will gradually develop to consume and understand the data on our portal.

At Code for Pakistan, we believe that this minor effort in the whole scheme of things will make a positive impact in our community, and you can always help us do better.