Increasing Kenyan open data consumption: a design thinking approach

In July 2011, the Kenyan Government became the twenty-second government worldwide and the second in Africa to release many of its data sets in an open and reusable format on the Open Kenya portal. This open data portal has presented great opportunities to develop applications, especially on the mobile platform. There have been, however, challenges in engaging the technical and industry experts in conversations around the open data. We are conducting an ethnographic study on an experiment that brings together subject matter experts in the Water, Education, Transport, and Local County sectors, together with open data evangelists and software developers to guide them through a design thinking approach to identifying, idea-ting, and prototyping open data applications. The main objective of this study is to identify best practices in increasing open data consumption through scalable mass appeal mobilization and civic engagement tools and applications.