Open Data Day, which  will take place on Saturday February 21, 2015, is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments. This activity will explore how increasingly available open data can be made more accessible and interesting to citizens and the media through innovative visualization techniques and tools.
 
 
As part of the global Open Data day 2015, Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM) will host the only Caribbean event out of 125 events in 65 countries. The session begins at 9:00am and will be held in Seminar Room 1-MSBM North. The activity will be carried out by students at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies.The day will start with a 1-hr hands-on workshop exposing participants to data extraction and visualization tools and techniques, including Tableau, Open spending, and other online resources available at the School of Data (http://schoolofdata.org/). After the workshop, teams will then choose to work on one of three data visualization challenges from the following domains:
 
 
a. Development Alert! is an online tool for increasing transparency and public engagement on projects that impact the environmental and public health,  Developed by the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Access Initiative, the online, interactive website allows the public can submit reports on projects they are concerned about or track information about new and existing high-impact developments. The data captured on Development Alert!  is made available as open data through a ReST API, and teams will explore different visualization techniques to make the data more accessible, visually appealing and interesting.
 
b. Jamaica's upcoming 2015-16 Budget debates will be intensely scrutinized and discussed. An important aspect of this debate is making budget information available and accessible to Civil Society (NGOs, journalists, citizens, etc.) in such a way that it provides a basis for discussions, participation and provides mechanisms for greater media / civil society engagement in the entire budget process. The available 2014/15 GOJ Budget was published online as a large pdf document. Teams will create more visually appealing and interesting views of the budget using the open spending platform.
 
c. A foundational part of Jamaica's track & field success is the highly competitive Boys & Girls Champs which is the culmination of an intense season of development meets that take place between Jan - March each year. Digicel has increased the excitement of the track & field season with the launch of its Grand Prix Athletic Championship which will see high schools across Jamaica competing to make it to the Grand Prix finale at the GC Foster College on March 14. Data on athlete performances from Champs 2014 together with data from these development meets will be used to create a track & field performance dashboard that tracks performance metrics and visualizations for schools and individual athletes.
 
 
This is a precursor to the hosting of Caribbean Open Data Conference (DevCA2015) which is scheduled for March 5-6, 2015.  The Caribbean Open Data Conference is a regional technology conference and code sprint, focused on open data, software innovation, and technology trends. The theme “Developing the Caribbean”, highlights the focus on Open Data as a catalyst for regional development, and the role of software development as a locus of innovation.  Held simultaneously across multiple islands, this year’s staging  will bring together an anticipated 500 regional conference attendees, technologists, public servants, academics and practitioners across five event sites in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba and Guyana. Now entering its fourth year the event features a twofold format; a development conference and a 24-hour code sprint code sprint competition in which teams of designers, developers, and domain experts work together to build solutions to social problems using open data.
 
 
The Jamaican leg of DevCA 2015 will be held from March 5-6, 2015 at the Faculty of Law Building, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus and will focus on developing IT enabled solutions for areas including Agriculture & Fisheries, Tourism, National Statistics, and Education. The Conference explores how technology can be used to enhance information access and service delivery within these domains.