Today, Development Gateway (DG) is pleased to announce that we have kicked off work with the Open Society Foundation in West Africa (OSIWA) to support the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). This work will focus on mapping data needs, availability, and use in the extractives sector in West Africa.

At Development Gateway (DG), we continually emphasize learning and improving on established tools, seeking out new ways of designing to optimize impact.

Since this past May, you’ve probably received a flood of company emails updating terms of service and consent requests to give permission to collect your data. You also probably know that this flood is all thanks to the EU’s recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has set us abuzz in its heightened protection of EU citizen data. But as members of the open data community, what does GDPR mean for our global movement?

Next week, we’ll be in Dubai, UAE for the 2nd UN World Data Forum – focusing on how data leads to impact across groups such as information technology experts, GIS experts, civil society organizations, and data producers and users. At an event as packed with awesome sessions, we know it can be tough to keep track of what's what, and who’s where – here’s a preview of where you can find DG. See you in Dubai!

This week, DG will be participating in the International Open Data Conference (IODC). While we will be attending an extensive mix of events – and focusing on gender issues in open data – we hope to see you at the following sessions in particular.

Development Gateway (DG) is proud to launch the Administrative Data-Driven Decisions (AD3) program, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Through this program, DG will work with governments in East and West Africa to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and use of administrative data systems.

As we've covered before, DG is pleased to be supporting the advancement of Open Contracting (OC) and enhancing data use in Senegal and Uganda. Through the Hewlett Foundation, we'll be completing a series of data use projects over the next two years, collaborating with local actors and developing tools to take existing open contracting efforts to the next level. In Senegal, we're working with the Autorité de Régulation des Marchés Publics (ARMP) and civil society partners to support the Government of Senegal and other key stakeholders in using procurement data to enhance procurement results.

Geography and accessibility to services hold significant weight in identifying comprehensive strategies to sustainably control the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Open Geospatial Data Center for Health (OpenDCH) project, supported by PEPFAR, aims to advance analysis of where the most affected communities are located, to focus on closing gaps in HIV testing and treatment. It will serve to improve understanding of HIV program coverage at the community level — leading to improved adherence, retention, and targeting of services.

Later this month, we’ll be attending the International Open Data Conference (IODC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Made possible by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, DG is pleased to the financial holder of travel grants that are supporting a selected group of women to join us at IODC. In doing so, we’ve partnered with the Open Heroines network, an online group of women in open government, civic tech, and open data that is driving the facilitation of each grant award.

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Accra Agenda for Action, we have conducted an AMP Retrospective on the DG blog. As our final Retrospective post, we are pleased to announce that DG has opened the source code of the Aid Management Platform (AMP). The now-public AMP source code is licensed under the GPLv3 open source license, which allows users to use and edit the software freely.