information technology – Step Up Consulting

OGP Bali — Mr Canares with some of the members of the Philippine delegation together with Ambassador Aguinaldo and Maria Ressa of Rappler.

Michael Canares, managing consultant of Step Up consulting is one of the representatives in the recent conference on Open Government Partnership held in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia on May 6-7 2014. The theme of the conference was “Unlocking Innovative Openness: Impetus to Greater Citizen Engagement“. The two-day event was opened with the plenary address of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in front of more than 500 delegates from across Asia-Pacific and the world.

Mr. Canares is one of the 30 Filipinos from government, academia, media, and civil society, who were invited to attend the high-level conference. The conference discussed on the innovations, opportunities, limitations, and challenges of open government in the region.

Mr. Canares was the self-appointed rapporteur of the Open Data Research Network, a network of researchers on open data where Step Up Consulting is a member. During the course of the conference, he wrote two blog posts that were featured in the Open Government Partnership and cited in several articles on open governance and transparency.

The links to the posts on the Open Government Partnership website can be found here. These posts originally appeared in the Open Data Research Network website.

Day 1 Summary

Day 2 Summary

Michael Canares, Team Leader of the Open LGU Research Project attended the first network meeting of the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries (ODDC Project) Research Project in London. In this photo, Michael Canares is with Tim Berners-Lee and the researchers from De La Salle University, Manila, who are also part of the ODDC project. Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web in 1989 and is the founding director of the World Wide Web Foundation, the implementer of the ODDC project.

The network meeting was held at the Open Data Institute in London, United Kingdom last 24-25 April, 2013. It was an an opportunity for project leaders of the 17 projects to get to know each other, and to explore shared research issues in understanding emerging impacts of open data.

The participants also attended an evening reception prior to the meeting at the Lancaster House co-hosted by the Open Government Partnership steering committee. At this reception, Web Foundation founder, and Web inventor, Sir Tim Berner-Lee formally launched the ODDC project and expressed the importance and potential contribution of the research to the work of the Open Government partnership, more particularly in exploring issues related to the use of open government data across the globe.

While in London, Mr. Canares also took the opportunity to attend the symposium on Data Driven Public Services hosted by Future Gov and sponsored by Capita. In this symposium, examples of how data can be effectively used to deliver services on the part of governments, or demand for better service delivery, on the part of citizens and neighborhoods.