Pushing the Frontier: Opening Data in Pakistan’s Education Sector
What is the Developyst Platform?
- Data Platform: The Data Platform will serve as a ‘one-stop shop’ for Education Data in Pakistan. It will enable users to interact visually and analytically with available education data. The goal is to increase the usage of available data, contextualize education data to external indicators such as poverty, population growth, etc., and create a coordinated mechanism to steer investment toward improving data quality, uniformity and coverage.
- Knowledge Platform: Linked to the Data Platform, the Knowledge Platform will serve as the research hub. Here, technology will play a key role in organizing user interests, questions and research gaps through Developyst Knowledge Products and through community sharing of best practices, innovations, challenges and research. At the outset of conveying our core value proposition, our initial debate is centered on whose role it is to provide access to data collected by the government, as well as data whose collection are funded by donors – as citizens, corporate, and donors. An emerging misunderstanding we want to dispel is whether Developyst is attempt to replace government agencies collecting, consolidating and analyzing data.
Identifying a Critical Gap in Education Data Value Chain as an Opportunity for Developyst
To answer the question raised above, Developyst’s value proposition aims to address a critical gap in the current configuration of activities from data collection to data access. Developyst’s business model is based on the hypothesis that data collectors must re-imagine their roles as information providers. Rather than struggling to design sites that meet each end-user need, the focus should be on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. According to Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, websites which provide interactive access for the public can best be built by third parties (such as Developyst). This approach is particularly important given recent advances in interactions with data: services like advanced search, automated content analysis, cross referencing with other data sources, and data visualization tools go far beyond merely offering data for viewing. The biggest advantage of third party data processing is to encourage the emergence of more advanced features, beyond simple delivery of data. In doing so Developyst’s aims to unlock the multi-billion rupees investment costs on data collection efforts and unleash intrinsic value through building user-engagement with data. This also allows big-picture consolidated analysis and feed-back mechanisms on how investments in data collection and data collected can be synchronized and improved.
Developyst’s Innovation Goes beyond Data Consolidation & Visualization
Developyst as Pakistan’s first social enterprise focused on building an interactive and inclusive information infrastructure for all things education is a dedicated group of change-makers. Our theory of change is built on the proposition that data and knowledge will intersect on the upcoming Developyst Platform to generate an informed and coordinated network of actors within the education sector. This platform will allow education stakeholders and ordinary citizens to participate in and lead online and mobile-enabled education campaigns and dialogues on key issues. Keep an eye on this space for Developyst updates, events, megaphones the coming weeks and months,and for details about the Developyst beta launch end of March 2013.
