Open data is being used to make educational opportunities accessible in many ways, including by helping parents and students make more informed educational choices and provide technical training. The most used data types include education, geospatial, and government spending.
Organizations use education performance data to provide students and parents information on cost, quality, and other factors to help them make better education choices. Others use open data to evaluate educational outcomes and government spending on education within a country. For instance, they use geospatial and demographic and social data to conduct analysis of schools based on population density, access to services, mobile penetration, and other factors.
As countries develop training programs in technology and data literacy, open data is a free resource for citizens to work with. Some organizations are using open data as a resource to teach students to analyze, visualize, and interpret real data around issues relevant to their communities and interests. From Kazakhstan to Brazil, open data is being used by developer groups, companies and universities alike to help people develop technical and data literacy skills.
Country: United States
Impact: Farmers benefit from tools for better crop management and to measure environmental factors
Data Used: Rainfall data from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, soil data from US Department of Agriculture
FarmLogs provides farmers with a free software and mobile application to map and analyze crop yields and environmental conditions for crop growth through government data. Their Farmlogs free Standard includes several features: Field Mapping, Scouting and Notes, Activity Tracking, Rainfall Tracking, GDD Accumulation, Soil Composition Maps, Growth Stage Analysis, Yield Maps, Input Planning. They also empower farmers to coordinate with the government to request data for their lands. On their website, FarmLogs details instructions on how to contact the US Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency for field boundary data. Upon receipt, FarmLogs interprets the data and creates field boundaries on mapping systems for farmers to demarcate their lands.