Players in agriculture are demanding a proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable, and GODAN Action project is advancing just that.

This is done in a number of ways, which includes capacity development through online course, data publication help desk, promoting best practice and common standards. Below we summarise some of the recent activities of the GODAN Action project.

Re-cap of recent activities

Map of data standards

GODAN Action Team developed Map of Data Standards to promote use of common standards for the exchange of data in the field of food and agriculture. For the purpose of improving how to measure the impact, the team designed an evaluation framework to assist evaluators in designing an evaluation.

Data Publication Help Desk

This framework provides guidelines and good practices for designing and performing evaluations, in different stages of a project which uses open data. GODAN Project Team also set up a Data Publication Help Desk to enable community for providing support to data publishers and data consumers regarding the use of existing standards for the exchange of data on agriculture and nutrition.

Capacity Development

Capacity development approach of the project consist of wide range of activities. GODAN Action delivered number of workshops and webinars, five MOOCs, developed communities of practice and network of trainers on open data management and relevant areas over the last two years. They all complement each other in order to support both data producers and users.

GODAN Action Team developed an online course called “Open Data Management in Agriculture, Nutrition and Land.” This online course aims to strengthen the capacity of data producers and data consumers to manage and use open data in agriculture and nutrition.

The development of the course was led by FAO of the UN with collaboration of the project partners. The detailed curriculum of the course for the first edition can be found on the GODAN website. Over the last year, the course content has been customized for nutrition and land, and relevant communities targeted in the delivery of the courses.

Since November 2017, over 4400 people have been enrolled in five editions of the course from 148 different countries. We had a diverse participation in terms of professional background and geographic locations.

About GODAN

GODAN Action is a three-year project, supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). It is led by Wageningen Environmental Research together with international partners including AgroKnow, AidData, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the Land Portal, the Open Data Institute (ODI) and the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA).

It aims to enable data users, producers and intermediaries to engage effectively with open data in the agriculture and nutrition sectors. In particular it works to strengthen capacity, to promote common standards and best practice and to improve impact measures. The project focuses on three thematic topics including weather and climate data, nutrition and land data.