The Web Foundation believes that Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives in low and middle-income countries can have a positive impact on their future socio-economic and political development. For that, these initiatives should focus on releasing information that matters to improve people’s lives and the society at large, and ideally leading to achieve the Open Government paradigm shift where citizens are better informed and more directly involved in political decision-making.

Some time ago the World Wide Web Foundation took the first steps in this direction by conducting an OGD readiness assessment in two countries – Chile and Ghana, as well as a subsequent implementation of the Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI).

Now, and as part of our focus on OGD initiatives, the Web Foundation continues contributing to global awareness raising about the benefits of Open Data in developing countries conducting a new Open Data readiness assessment in Indonesia in coordination with the Ford Foundation regional office.

This study builds on our experience with the previous ones, as well as the Web Foundation’s general Open Data expertise, to evolve our methodology and define OGD readiness of the country on the basis of several factors. These include, amongst others, the policy and legal framework, the technology landscape, the availability and quality of and access to government data, the general demand from users and the level of skills for working with the data.

The study explores Indonesia’s OGD readiness, based on independent research to provide quantitative and qualitative data supplemented by a field visit to identify and interact with different groups of key stakeholders and local champions who might be involved in an OGD initiative locally, and to identify potential threats and opportunities not identified during the initial research. We focus our attention on existing capacities, and on identifying capacity building programs that may be required to develop a long-term, locally sustainable and successful initiative.

This report summarizes the results of the assessment and highlights potential challenges and threats that need to be addressed. We hope it will also aim to identify a core group of actors at all the three levels (government, bureaucracy and civil society) that will be key for the successful implementation of an OGD initiative in Indonesia.

We are now publishing the draft version of the report (download here) to gather comments from the OGD community. We kindly invite you to read the report and send your comments to public-ogd@webfoundation.org before June 18th, 2013.

Your comments are very valuable for us and will contribute to assist the growing OGD community in the developing world by providing new tools, best practices and support.