 Hello and welcome to Issues and Answers. I am your host for today, Jolene Beeset-Joseph. This is a production of the Government Information Service. Four Latin American and Caribbean countries will first assign the Eskuzu Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters at the United Nations Headquarters in New York last year. Saint Lucia was one of the first countries to sign. To coincide with this, Saint Lucia's first open data portal was launched during the same year. To tell us more about what this means to and for Saint Lucia, I'm actually joined today by Miss Tisha Jabatis, who is the MEA Project Coordinator at the Department of Sustainable Development and Miss Louise Mathry-Série, Coordinator of the Open Data Central Team at the Department of Public Service. Thank you for joining me today, ladies. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Now, in my opening, I mentioned the Eskuzu Agreement. Can you just first, very briefly, just inform us of what exactly that is? Well, the Eskuzu Agreement, as you said, essentially states that at the national level, all individuals should have access to public information and given the opportunity to participate and to participate in issues concerning the environment, which is relevant for them as an individual, as a community. Okay. Now, as I also said, the agreement actually led to the opening of the open data program in Saint Lucia. So, tell us first, what is an open data program? What is open data? Actually, the agreement did not lead to it, but they definitely related. Okay. And sometimes I joke and say that it was adopted in Eskuzu on March 4th on International Open Data Day. Okay. So maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe it is. Open Data is essentially about the way in which data is shared. It's about having technical and legal characteristics to ensure that the data is easy to reuse. And when data is easy to reuse, it has been shown to have a wealth of benefits, not just for those who use the data in the public and private sector, but for the country at large in terms of improving productivity and efficiency. When I speak of the technical characteristics, I'm speaking of data being in electronic format easy to download and easy to use on whichever software programs that the user has. And the legal characteristics means that the data has an open license and there are no legal restrictions to use of that data. And there is no obligation for a person who uses the data to reimburse the original publisher of that data. And in our case, we're specifically speaking to data produced by the government, which is already in the public domain. So Open Data does not deal with or does not encourage the sharing of data that is going to infringe on a person's right to privacy. It does not involve sharing private individuals' information or any data that will be a security risk in terms of national security. Okay. Brilliant. Now you were saying a while ago that the Open Data Portal being launched kind of coincided with the siding. So when did work actually begin with St. Lucia actually taking steps to have this program? It actually began in 2014 with the Open Data Readiness Assessment and the Open Data Readiness Assessment included a series of consultations with public sector agencies, private sector agencies, as well as civil society. And the Open Data Readiness Assessment was a collaboration between the governmental St. Lucia and the World Bank and it was funded by DFID, UK. And what it found was that St. Lucia does have the capacity to carry out a successful Open Data program. We do have the human resources and, most importantly, there was a wealth of data being collected in the various government agencies, education data, health data, weather data, finance data, which is very important in terms of public participation, which Tisha mentioned. Okay. All right. Now you're the coordinator of the, sorry, the MEA, Project Coordinator. Can you tell us what the MEA is, first of all? Sure. It's Multilateral Environmental Agreements. So what we essentially did was to develop a national environmental information system. One of the provisions of ESCAS is actually to ensure that the country has one or more information systems readily available to allow the public and the private sector with access to information. And so with the NEIS, it was developed to specifically look at the multilateral environmental agreements that we as a country have signed on to. And for the public, who may not be aware that we have signed on to at least 20 environmental conventions. Oh, wow. Yes. And so we're now looking at essentially piloting three of the conventions to see how well we can collect data, original data, and new information on an environment, particularly looking at issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land desertification. Okay. And so with collaboration with the public service, and other entities within the public and private sector, we are able now to utilize data from the open data portal as well as other data provided from the private sector to report in a more scientific way when we report on those conventions. Okay. Because signing is just one aspect. But we need to report and to show trends, to show what is happening in terms of our biodiversity loss, what are the different climatic variations happening. And so data, scientific information is very important to us ensuring we provide evidence-based information. Okay. All right. Now you touched on it a bit there. And I know Mrs. Sarie actually touched on it as well. But can you more generally speak about overall what you believe the benefits of having such a system would be to St. Lucia? I believe that open data allows for an improved efficiency, first of all, within government. And this is something that has been proven in countries that started their open data programs in the 90s, like the UK. They found that in some cases as much as 80% of users were actually from within government. And so there's a need for persons carrying out research, carrying out their day-to-day. There's a need for them to know what other agencies are doing and to access that data within seconds at some times when their decisions to be made. So first and foremost, in terms of improving the public service and the service that they in turn deliver to the public, to clients out there, then that would be first and foremost one of the benefits of open data. Beyond that, there are benefits such as when you think of data-driven enterprise, businesses using this data to make investment decisions. This is important both for local and foreign investors as well as marketing agencies. This is something that has been proven in research that was done by the Caribbean Open Institute in Jamaica looking at how open data is really something that is demanded by businesses, particularly its potential to grow data-driven businesses in the region. And then one that I think is very valuable in terms of the benefits of open data is the potential to help make it easier for young entrepreneurs within the ICT sector to develop applications. So with open data and the way in which the data is provided, it is of interest to what we call app developers. And there have been examples of app developers pulling open data to carry out very interesting activities or interesting programs or apps provide services. Okay. Well actually, Canada, don't want to cut you off. We'll come straight back to it. However, it's just time for a commercial break. We'll be back after this. The climate in Canada has changed and it has affected all of us. If the climate had been worse, we would have had to take the water from all the animals and plant them. I think the sea has become warmer and it has found a place where people can live. It has also changed the way that people can live on the side and go to their side. This list has contributed a small amount of gas in Spain. With TPI, we can try to do everything we can to ensure that we lower the amount of gas on the side to prevent it from getting warmer. We have to lower the amount of gas on the side to prevent it from getting warmer. For me, it has changed. And it has changed the way that people can live on the side to prevent the gas from getting warmer. Exactly. And it has changed the way that people can live on the side to prevent the gas from getting warmer. This is what we can do with our app. We can do everything we can to prepare and rebuild for these negative consequences on the climate change. We all know how to do it. For example, we can do it by protecting all the people who are living here. We can do it by protecting the people who are living here. We can do it by building a canal so that people can live here. We can do everything we can to live in climate change. We can find information about the national government and the marches we take to protect the people and all our citizens. Thank you for staying with issues and answers. Today we are discussing open data. Now before we went to the break, we were talking about the benefits of there being such a program in St Lucia. So if you can carry on telling me about the benefits. I think from a global perspective, countries with successful open data programs are viewed as countries which follow rules of good governance. And there's also the benefit of allowing persons to have a better view of what government is doing by being able to access government data allows for public participation. Okay, that's very important. Citizens are able to give input based on real information not on opinions. And just to add to what Luis said, it's actually very important on the national level in terms of how our policy makers actually make decisions because that information and data actually helps guide future climatic scenarios in Africa and Latin America. We saw them using open data to actually show trends in climate variations in the countries. And that information is very helpful when they seek funding from the international agencies because they're not only able to provide anecdotal information, but they provide evidence of the different variations. And in terms of St Lucia, what we've been doing is actually building our capacity within the public service and the private sector to help persons understand that data in itself is a tool that can be used to provide analysis and more visual representation of what is happening on the ground when you look at environmental trends and what is really impacting us and in St Lucia. And so we have been training over 80 persons within the public sector and private sector in using data to do impact risk analysis, for example, and understanding what environmental indicators are and how that can be utilized to make their work better and also showing them how they can communicate it in a more visual way to the general public so that as a people we can understand when we see the different trends in real-time, as Luis said, and you could see that over a million different scenarios can be developed with using material data, for example. So these types of assimilations are quite important to us understanding as a country as well as on a policy level. Brilliant, brilliant. Now, something that both of you mentioned was the fact that how beneficial this will be for the different agencies within the government that want to know, get accurate information from other agencies. What are the agencies that people that are involved in the open data program at the moment that data can people actually derive from them? Currently, there are 15 agencies that have been registered on the open data portal and they provide 39 different data sets which in themselves would have data for various years on different topics. In some cases, when we have data-heavy agencies such as the NEIS, we would provide a link to their database and central statistics as well, we would provide a link to their database in terms of finance. Finance has some revenue and expenditure data up, all of the revenue and expenditure data. Education provides all of the data that is in the educational digest on the website. There is 41 years of weather data on the open data website as well from the Met Office. I find very impressive there's 21 years of data from tourism. It was one of the early agencies that came on board with open data and we've grown as we move on. We recently have NEMO data, information from NEMO, quite a few, trying to ensure that I didn't leave any agencies out physical planning. I'm very impressive there's data in terms of geospatial data being able to look at locations of different things. Yes, so it's quite a few data sets and it's quite useful because we've seen we had a recent set of user engagements where there were bootcamps where the students at the end had to create projects using the data and what they proposed, the different projects they proposed were quite brilliant and insightful and I'm hoping to see them come to fruition because I think they will be useful to St. Lucia. Now you mentioned NEIS, so what exactly is the NEIS and how are they using open data? How are they benefiting from it? Within the Department of Sustainability, what we do is we really try to continue coordinating with agencies, particularly government agencies. NEIS in itself is a national environmental information system. It's more or less, it's linked to the open data portal and with the NEIS the public and agencies who sign on to MOU access to all the indicators under the three conventions which I mentioned earlier in terms of the climate change convention, the biodiversity convention and the land justification convention. So we have our negotiators going to the international forum reporting on the status of the environment relating to these conventions. However, sometimes they need on hand information. They need the data on hand. So we've built a system where people need to contact us and sometimes you know time differences. They could go online, they could log on, they could access the information, the actual raw data, they could actually show the visual in different graphical formats of that information. Additionally, that information is accessible to the reports that are being done under those conventions. So for example, and the biodiversity we are currently conducting the sixth national update report on challenges to collecting data. Usually we would have to go to all the agencies in St. Lucia who would to get that information. Now we have that information in one centralized system and that information will assist us to do this report in a more efficient and effective manner. So essentially, that system is a tool we use to ensure that St. Lucia is reporting again not only but data that is current and also users of what you see to see what are the new trends in terms of our environment in St. Lucia. Okay, because you touched on something that I was going to actually ask you, which was how was it before in regards to having to retrieve data between the agencies and such like? Yes, in 2014 an update on our national self-assessment St. Lucia's national self-assessment identified that there were quite a bit of limitations to helping to us reporting on environmental agreements in terms of lack of data but what we understood that there is data available in St. Lucia but the issue was the coordination of data and so with the open data portal and with the NEIS we're not better able to coordinate and have access to information on hand and it is very important for us as a country being able to import efficient way and also it now creates a culture in St. Lucia where people understand how data can be utilized and why it is important for us to have access to information. Okay, brilliant. Now it's time for us to have one more break so if you just bear with us we'll be right back. Bio means life. Biodiversity is a variety of life all around us or plants, animals and microbes and the places where they live. We need to protect biodiversity so that we can continue to enjoy all the resources it provides fresh air, clean water food, clothing, shelter and recreation. Biosafety ensures that we protect biodiversity against any negative impacts of GMOs while using it safely for national development. For more information on the Biosafety project and how you can be involved please visit 751-8746 or 722-9252 log on to lc.biosafetycleringhouse.net or join the mailing list slu-biosafety at govt.lc Welcome back to Issues and Answers our discussion today centers around open data initiative which is presently active in St. Lucia. Now before we went to the break we were talking about how hard it was but what are the different components? I know it's not just a case of there's a portal where people can go to get open data there's actually a whole program so just explain to me what the different components of the whole initiative are. With St. Lucia open data there are three components that would help to ensure that the program achieves all of the benefits of the policy recommended. The first would be the open data policy and we had a policy first approach with open data the policy was approved in November 2017 and it basically provided for a government to have one approach to how open data is shared within in terms of data that is already in the public domain should be shared and made open by default and it's basically open by default means that as opposed to me going to you and saying can I have that data because so and so it's a case it's supposed to be a case where you proactively share that data because it's already in the public domain you've already published it in digest why not make it in a format that's easy for me to reuse. It's almost like making by an expensive plate of food but not eating it at all because use it as efficiently as you want to if you have to hold that book and retype it for hours until the sunrise. So the policy spoke to that to have in a government wide approach and it has been shown that having a sort of more senior level policy or in the case of other countries would have been decreased from president and so on this helps to drive an open data policy and it helps to ensure that the public officers who become involved understand that they have that framework that they work in within and the support from a more senior level. So the policy is one component the other component would be the open data portal which actually is how we implement some of what the policy is stating and so that is data.govt.lc where you could go on there and you could search for the data sets that you want. You could also read data stories and the collaboration of open data we also had the launching of an open data showcase so the showcase is on that website as well and it basically shows how different agencies use data for research both in the public and private sectors so it has a series of features and currently you could also go and preview the data, visualize it if it's map data on maps etc. The third component would be user engagement. This seeks to bring to light the fact that the policy doesn't just speak to sharing data but it also speaks to encouraging the use of open data in other sectors both the public sector and other sectors. So in the vein of user engagement we just completed a series of what we call open data meetups following the launch of the open data portal which happened in June last year, June 8th we started what we had what we call a data boot camp which included persons from civil society, from the non-government agencies organizations both public and private sector and we partnered with an organization called Slash Rouge Foundation from Jamaica and Code for Africa and they all came here and they trained them how to access free applications to actually analyze data and to use data to build applications and this continued for the last five months they would meet monthly to work on these projects so that is part of user engagement and also for our data help we communicate with persons who are working on various research projects as well so that would be the third component. There are also plans which we're very excited about to have a few application contests so that is the ball is rolling on that and we have a Facebook page that persons can go to to keep abreast of what's happening we would announce any other event and we also collaborate with the ICT association on the meetups and imagine solutions and there's currently a website Sennusha Open Community I remember correctly but I will post a website on the Facebook page so that everybody could see it and all of the information that we used all of the websites were introduced free applications were introduced the documents that they used during the meetups and the bootcamp has been posted on that as resources so that persons could access those who missed out. Now one of the things I was going to ask but you kind of answered it there was what's next on the agenda initiative as it's taking place in Sennusha but you answered a lot of that here so let me just ask you Meshawatis what about for the NEIS is there anything that we should know about? Oh yes, there are quite a bit happening again within the department we believe that nothing is done in silos so we'll be leaving the coordination and collaborating with all agencies so the NIS has been developed it also has a back end access for all the agencies who signed on to a common data storage facility and that is where they go and actually input the relevant data for reporting on the NEIS and so we've been training agencies as persons as data contributors data administrators to ensure that they are able to to utilize it and it's a very simple tool very accessible by anyone so we're strengthening the agency's ability to input their own data while at the same time we're ensuring that the public is aware of that so we've been doing quite a number of public awareness campaigns and we continue to collaborate with agencies who are doing their own campaigns for example we're working with the science and technology officer in the Ministry of Education they'll be going out to do some information sessions in the different communities particularly looking at the sarcasm issue so we're showing them how data on the portal can be utilized to actually show to report on those issues additionally we've been mainstreaming the NEIS into the different sectors because we want them to understand that the NEIS has benefits as Louise would have said in terms of persons from the international arena looking to conduct business in Senusha so data can be utilized for them to see how well Senusha is doing and so we're looking to show that agencies how they can use the data to show relevance for like for example impacts, risk assessments and even for the policymaking decisions at the sectoral levels so we'll be continuing those mainstreaming initiatives for this year and also doing a communications strategy plan we have developed and so we'll also be reaching out to the media to also inform them of the NEIS and try to have some discussions with the media and other entities to see how well we can inform the public of this system that can be utilized Okay, brilliant. Well ladies, thank you so much for the discussion. We are actually out of time at the moment however I'm very happy you came in because I had seen open data and even the portal advertised but I didn't really know too much about you so thank you very much for coming in and sharing with us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for being a part of Issues and Answers however it's time for us to say bye bye so from us here at NTN bye for now.