Awards

Pushpa Singh of the Civil Society Information Services India in India will develop a common repository to receive, validate, and store information from multiple sources on not-for-profit organizations to make it easier to access support from philanthropic intermediaries. Philanthropic intermediaries currently perform independent searches to find appropriate NGO partners to support, which costs time, money, and effort. The relevant data generated during these searches would benefit others, but it is often wasted, made inaccessible, or in a form that makes it incompatible with similar datasets. To address this, Singh will build a validated, searchable, and up-to-date NGO information source. Using test partners, Singh will design and develop the architecture for the system, which includes a tool that can transform diverse types of data into a standard format and vice-versa, and an tool for importing and export data.

Simon Parrish of Development Initiatives in the United Kingdom will create a toolkit for the generation of a single interoperable dataset from diverse databases to help more users better assess the impact of resource spending in developing countries. Accurately assessing the impact of spending in areas such as health and education in specific locations, and the ability to directly compare different locations, is necessary to effectively eradicate poverty. However, the relevant datasets are currently incompatible or difficult to access by the appropriate communities. Parrish will partner with a Ugandan organization and community leaders in two districts to identify relevant datasets and the pertinent information they contain. This will be used to generate a merged dataset along with a web-based tool for local users, which will then be evaluated for interoperability and usability.

H.V. Jagadish of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will take disparate datasets on diverse topics, including education, health, and the environment, which are often reported using different geographical units such as Zip Code or County, and realign them to a common unit so they can be better compared and used. Jagadish will develop four general techniques for aligning data partitions and apply them to existing datasets in one state in the U.S. so that they can be viewed according to different geographical units. Jagadish will also produce an interface so that policy analysts and NGOs can easily access and query these data, and collect feedback to improve the approach.

Wayan Vota of Development Gateway in the U.S. will combine data generated by citizens and governments into an interactive interface that can be easily accessed and used by average citizens in order to improve their communities. They will focus on education in three Nairobi slums, and engage the local community and government. An application interface will be designed using relevant datasets, such as school performance statistics, community reports, and geographic data, and used to build an interface that can be accessed over the internet or distributed in print form or via messages sent to mobile phones. They will conduct local workshops to test their approach.

Vijay Modi and colleagues of Columbia University in the U.S. will create a universal database to centralize the mapping of social infrastructures, such as schools, clinics, and water points, to improve data accuracy and help to better coordinate aid efforts. Currently, data collection of physical points occurs across multiple platforms, and is inefficient and difficult to update. They will build and host a web service providing a simple database that is easy to access and edit to promote widespread adoption and thereby sharing and integration of important datasets.

Gisli Olafsson of NetHope Inc. in the U.S. will work to improve humanitarian information management to better inform decision-making in emergency situations, such as after a natural disaster. In a crisis situation, information on what is needed and what is being done comes from different humanitarian organizations, but these data often do not conform to universal standards or are not made generally available. She will consult experts from the private sector and incorporate best practices from different existing data standards efforts. This information will be used to develop a cloud-based interoperability platform that enables information to flow among different systems and be easily accessed by decision makers.