How can open data evangelists or information services professionals help redress global inequalities? Our live chat panel share ideas and resources

Lawrence Gudza, coordinator, Practical Answers, Practical Action, Zimbabwe, South Africa

Keep up with knowledge needs in developing countries: Libraries must be cognisant of the amount of illiteracy still prevalent in some communities among developing countries and therefore come up with innovative ways of sharing development knowledge and information with the illiterate population.

Bring the information to the people: The location of physical libraries can be a problem for people who live in rural areas. Libraries must therefore go to the people rather than expect them to come to the libraries. That way, libraries could position themselves to be partners both to development agents and beneficiary communities.

Make information relevant for the poor: From our experience here in Zimbabwe, we note that there is a lot of information and knowledge out there, but most of it is irrelevant to the needs of the poor. It is important to identify relevant knowledge for the circumstances under focus, ensure that the knowledge can be understood by those for whom it is intended and work with them to value add to that knowledge.

Samuel Lee, open data specialist, World Bank, Washington, DC, US

Don't build new communities if you can leverage existing ones: Being able to realise the potential that access to information and open data have will, in large part, depend on an iterative, inclusive, and demand-driven approach. Rather than building new communities, we should be leveraging communities that already exist and libraries seem to be an interesting candidate. This, in part, will also help communities cross the digital divide as the barriers to information technology continue to fall.

Make information 'practically' open: While information may be legally and technically open, it also benefits greatly from also being 'practically' open. This means providing basic tools to digest information and adding appropriate context. Sometimes this means using mobile technology, social media, and translation into local languages and settings. We thought a lot along those lines when designing World Bank Open Finances' latest mobile app.

Resources:

Lots of great capacity building efforts in Kenya, starting with a data journalism bootcamp, have blossomed into a very robust effort with several media houses and civic groups like Code4Kenya.

On the subject of the digital divide, this thought provoking article by writer Emily Badger on how the internet reinforces inequality in the real world is worth a read.

Stuart Hamilton, director of policy and advocacy, International Federation of Library Associations, The Hague, Netherlands

Libraries must play to their strengths: The best way for the library community to maximise its development potential is to bring policymakers, funders and development agencies examples of what it can achieve. The Beyond Access platform aims to do this by bringing libraries together to share success stories.

Resources:

The Public Library Innovation Programme from Electronic Information for Libraries makes small grants to public libraries in developing and transition countries to recognise innovation and encourage upscaling.

SMS apps are increasingly popular, especially among populations without smartphones, Frontline SMS has some good examples.

Censorship can reduce the development impacts of libraries. IFLA produces a world report that looks at the state of internet censorship across the library community.

There are many libraries worldwide that serve the blind and disabled population. IFLA has a dedicated section 'libraries serving persons with print disabilities' that brings them together and offers advice.

Tony Roberts, co-founder, Web Gathering, London, UK

Don't ignore the political elements of promoting knowledge: In order to translate information into knowledge and knowledge into power, the process needs to be political to some extent. Information access is one element of a broader process to redistribute and share power and global resources in a way that is socially just. To do this we must go beyond access to ensure that all actors have what governance specialist at the World Bank Institute, Bjorn-Soren Giger, calls the 'informational capabilities' to make effective use of information and transform unjust power relations.

Don't entrench inequalities: In order for access to information to translate into a reduction in existing inequity and disadvantage, sustained investment is needed to increase the agency and capabilities of disadvantaged users. Without this investment, information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D) projects risk widening divides and making the situation worse.

Tony German, executive director, Development Initiatives, Bristol, UK

Keep up with new tech innovations and apply them to development: Information can benefit the world's poorest by expanding the choice and control they have. What will advantage the elites, and create greater divisions in societies, is if policymakers don't tackle now how to apply the open data revolution and new innovations in technology to development initiatives.

Make resources cheap for policy makers: Providing free or low-cost access to high quality journals and research about information access is crucial to helping policymakers find answers to their questions.

Resources:

Open data is a relatively new concept in some developing countries, but it's picking up steam. Here's a Development Initiatives blog about the open data movement in Nepal.

Development Research Training in Uganda have come up with really innovative ways of running its projects, using what they call "people-centred research into poverty eradication".

Jelena Rajic, librarian, Jagodina Public Library, Jagodina, Serbia

Don't replace books with computers: Both books and computers have important roles in educating people. At the Jagodina Public Library, where we now have computers and internet access, current agricultural literature and journals, the books on agriculture are still the most popular resources among our members.

Libraries have economic benefits: The village library branches of the Jagodina Public Library provide farmers with information and communication technology (ICT) training and agricultural lectures on topics relevant to them. The idea is to improve their economic situation by helping them use computers to buy and sell produce and machinery on library websites such as this.

Resources:

Here is a video showing the renovation and progress of four libraries in the Jagodina region after decades of disuse.

Steve Song, founder, Village Telco, Nova Scotia, Canada

Keep the broader development agenda in mind: The most way to drive the access to information agenda forward is to keep it grounded in the broader development agenda that you are pursuing – from a rights and capabilities perspective, a power perspective, an innovation perspective or all of the above. Open data in particular is in danger of falling prey to the hyper techno-enthusiasm that marked the early days of ICT4D. Hopefully we won't have to learn that lesson again.

We need a creative mix of for-profit and non-for profit initiatives: Many for-profit organisations are not interested in hard to reach groups and, from an access perspective, we have seen the failure of many telecommunications companies to live up to their universal service obligations. Yet we have also seen the explosion of commercial 'bottom of the pyramid' services offered by for-profit companies that offer significant value. One need only look at the mPesa offering financial services to hard to reach areas. I think we need a creative mix of non-profit and for-profit initiatives.

David Banisar, senior legal counsel, Article 19, London, UK

Libraries can play many roles in promoting transparency: Providing open data will be a feature of future digital libraries. But in the meantime, there are important roles that they can play as intermediaries to other government transparency efforts. For example, they can act as reading rooms for the public to access information released by governments.

Editor's note: What did we miss? Know other ways to turn information to knowledge, and knowledge to power? Share your tips in the comments below.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up free to become a member of the Global Development Professionals Network

It was like a "literacy-palooza" with kids "stage-diving for books." That was the scene that John Wood describes as his "game-over moment," or the moment he decided to quit Microsoft and pursue his non-profit organization, Room to Read, full-time.  Wood had gone on a hiking trip in Nepal and ...

Read More

Every single day, almost every mainstream news source in America offers live updates throughout the day on a few metrics which have almost no meaning for most Americans. Whether it's a radio broadcast, a local TV station going to commercials, or the homepage of most big news sites, you'll see a nod to how the stock market is doing, despite the fact that stocks exist as, at best, an abstraction having to do with a theoretical future retirement for all but the wealthiest in the United States.

Covering the Dow in every news update is like reporting on the price of a Mercedes daily. It's information only of actual use to the richest extreme of people in America. Yet we act as if it's information so central to our economic well-being that we talk about it as often as the weather. We evaluate presidents during our elections based upon stock performance during their tenures, without having any other long-term indices used in the conversation.

We can do better, by creating and discussing a daily economic index that has to do with the economic lives of regular people. The importance of understanding these concepts is illustrated perfectly by this brief video that's becoming extremely popular:

What Would an Opportunity Index Look Like?

I should be clear: While I am versed in the cultural impacts that this kind of index could have, I am nowhere near literate enough in economics to actually offer meaningful advice on how to construct it. But I can offer a broad view of the way it could come together, to inspire a useful conversation by those who are experts.

Let's look a few key traits a meaningful opportunity index would have to include:

• Opportunity: The first, and most important principle of creating a meaningful economic index would be to have it attempt to measure or represent the potential opportunity for everyone in the economy, not just the wealthy. Income inequality must be a significant part of this metric, but so too should straightforward factors like the minimum wage, the regressiveness of tax code, and other structural barriers to opportunity for everyone. The key thing to understand is that such an index does not have to be a perfect representation of these concerns; Indeed, nobody would argue that the DJIA or NASDAQ function as even rudimentary measurements of the real economy. Instead, they're useful as detailed measures of a tiny number of variables that are considered important as indicators, and an opportunity index should be similarly narrow in scope but broad in possible interpretations.
• Daily: This is one of the most contentious aspects of such an index, from the perspective of those concerned about data quality and relevance. While we're used to the stock market trading at light speed (literally!) with the backing of some of the riches and most powerful companies in the world, our measurements of real people's financial lives are typically done by small, underfunded non-profit organizations and government agencies, with results coming out monthly or even annually. It will take both a cultural change from those institutions and the use of smarter, faster data to power a meaningful measure of opportunity. For this reason, it may make sense to base some parts of the measure on very dynamic existing metrics like the markets for financial instruments, but to consider them through an algorithm that's weighted by relevance to average people's economic concerns.
• A simple number: One of the oldest, and most valid, criticisms of the big market index numbers is that they're such blunt instruments that they don't actually represent anything useful. But the very simplicity of the indices is what makes them so powerful in our culture. I'd reckon that most folks don't actually understand what makes up that "Dow" number they hear about on the news, or that its components change, or that almost all of the new entrants to the index are not "industrial" in any recognizable classic interpretation of the term. But that one number people hear about? It goes up or down. It can be charted and tracked. For all the murkiness of what it's actually measuring, its role in society is clear. And an index that tracks measurements which represent ordinary concerns could be even more powerful.

Who Can Do This?

There's been interesting precedent around private companies defining these sorts of measures, especially in media. Though broad, slowly-measured statistics about these sorts of things are usually the domain of government agencies, the example set by everything from Twitter showing follower counts to the Weather Channel deciding to name winter storms shows that there are media-ready messages that can be created as a proprietary marketing exercise, yet come to represent much bigger concepts in culture. And of course, the Dow average itself is a perfect example of this.

I can imagine a useful combination of a major traditional media organization (New York Times, CNN) along with a respected non-partisan non-profit with data experience (Sunlight Foundation, Pew Research) and a tech industry player that would be helpful in collecting and/or disseminating the data (Google, Buzzfeed, Twitter). The coordination would almost certainly have to come from the non-profit player, unless a single company could be convinced to bankroll the thing from end to end.

But the final result, if successful, could be a meaningful measure that would create a brand name mentioned millions of times a day across thousands of media outlets around the world. And not incidentally, if successful, it would become a powerful tool for treating ordinary citizen's economic concerns as being as central to the news as the daily fluctuations of the porfolios of the super rich.

Related Reading

I thought this slideshow called "A Crack in the Matrix: A Financial Fable" from David Bressler did a really nice job of illustrating how communications about personal finance can really distort economic information in a way that misleads average people about their financial situation.

• Inequality.org, from the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, is an outstanding and undersung resource for articulating many of these issues. If some of the information they're presented could be made live and more dynamic, it'd be a wonderful start toward a true opportunity index.
• A few years ago Business Insider aggregated a broad range of infographics on income inequality that is still striking; They should post an updated version of this with newer data, to show how the current economic recovery has essentially only accrued to the wealthy.

I'm sure there are very complex issues that I'm glossing over in this brief description of the Daily Opportunity Index idea, but I'm looking forward to responses from those who are more literate in the topic to provide insights on what I've missed.