The GODAN initiative was announced at the Open Government Partnership Conference in October 2013 following 2012 G8 discussions. Participants made commitments to Open Data for Agriculture at the International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture in Washington D.C. where USDA Secretary Vilsack was the Head of Delegation for the US Government. Subsequently the Governments of the United States and United Kingdom collaborated to form this global initiative. GODAN currently has 170 member globally.
GODAN supports the proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable to deal with the urgent challenge of ensuring world food security. The initiative focuses on building high-level support among governments, policymakers, international organizations and business. GODAN promotes collaboration to harness the growing volume of data generated by new technologies to solve long-standing problems and to benefit farmers and the health of consumers. We encourage collaboration and cooperation between stakeholders in the sector.
IGAD has grown in community strength and interactions and it is the aim to take this forward in focused manner to the plenary 7 of the RDA. At plenary 6 meeting of IGAD members enlisted the following dimensions for good agricultural data management:
• Awareness has to be raised for the necessity to open data repositories by researchers and private actors
• Awareness has to be raised to implement good data management policies within institutions to support openness and standards that should be applied to data repositories.
• Awareness has to be raised for the existence of tools and already existing standards that just have to be used in order to facilitate good data management
Furthermore, the linking between existing communities and initiatives was underlined in order to benefit from synergies and advocate for good data management.
Of particular significance is the shared interest between the objectives of IGAD-RDA and GODAN initiative which is described as 'facilitation of sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable'. At the RDA plenary 7 it is proposed to take the IGAD-GODAN objectives forward by convening a meeting of stakeholders to discuss and deliberate on important issues and solutions such as agriculture data sharing, curation, interoperability, policy frameworks among other topics.
Goals of this Joint Session
• To streamline the collaboration between Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative
• To solicit and promote interactions and projects between both initiatives particularly in the areas of advocating of openness on research data in agriculture and nutrition and building infrastructures for open data
• To explore how to achieve better data interoperability in agriculture and nutrition
Introduction to IGAD and GODAN: common perspectives, common goals
Wrap up
Conclusions and future paths for IGAD
• Government representatives, funders, representatives of international agencies – UN, EU etc
• Agriculture domain experts, researchers, academicians
• Data providers, data publishers
• Data managers, data mining experts, data analysts
• Librarians, data curators