From September 26-29, several of us from Datasketch traveled to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to participate in this event. Here, we tell you about our experience and highlight some of the key issues on the agenda.

Open America?

América Abierta is the confluence of two major events in Latin America and the Caribbean: Abrelatam-ConDatos, which has been a meeting point for the data community in the region since 2013, and the OGP Regional Meeting to discuss the mechanisms through which governments can address transcendental issues.

More than 400 people from 29 countries participated. Eight people from the Datasketch team - coming from three different countries - attended to analyze the path to openness and propose collective actions to strengthen our democracies.

Abrelatam took the form of an unconference, which brought together all the sectors present to establish together the most relevant points to achieve an effectively open America. You can read the demands, debates and ideas resulting from this exercise in this thread or in the Declaration (es).

On the other hand, the OGP Meeting conversations brought open government issues to the table, such as prevention and fight against corruption through monitoring of public procurement, accountability, access to justice and parliamentary openness.

What did we talk about?

As you can see, the topics of the conference were quite varied. We would need much more than a newsletter issue to address them all, but you can see the agenda on the official website and watch the conferences that interest you most on the OGP youtube channel.

We tell you here what we discussed and the conversations we initiated that we hope to contribute to open spaces, data and processes in the region.

• Edu Martín-Borregón, our executive director, was in the conversation GovTech + Civic Tech. From his experience in data journalism, he talked about the points of intersection and divergence of these two agendas on topics such as artificial intelligence, privacy and community. His intervention in one sentence: “Privacy is for the weak, radical transparency for the powerful”.
• Edda Forero, the coordinator of our Culture area, shared Datasketch’s experience in the exhibition Spinning Futures 2050: textile interventions in Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Brazil and the Dominican Republic to spin dialogues about futures in the region in a lightning talk. His intervention in one sentence: “Normally, we think we can tell stories with data. However, data also has stories”.
• Natalia Ruiz, our Design Coordinator, took part in a workshop of the Latin American Open Data Initiative (ILDA). She presented our journey in LGBTIQ+ population data projects to strengthen the processes of violence prevention. Her intervention in one sentence: “If we want to visualize the reality of the LGBTIQ+ population, it is important to include user-centered design processes to ensure their understanding”.

How to bring data closer to the people?

This question is a recurring theme in this kind of events. At Datasketch we have been thinking about this issue for years and looking for alternatives to bring data out of the desktops and serve people.

One of our proposals is Datasketch Store. In it, we offer collections with designs that take the results of different data-driven research and transform them into products such as T-shirts, hoodies or pins.

With our designs, we want to generate conversations that allow us to seek solutions to public problems and democratize access to information. For this reason, we took advantage of América Abierta to launch a new collection that puts on the table some issues that concern us, which you can learn more about in the links.

• ⛳ Red Flags | Identifying potential corruption risks.
• 📶 Connected people | Percentage of internet penetration and digital divide.
• 🏦 Women in Congress | Political representation of women in the world.
• 📢 It wasn’t my fault | Demonstration against women’s rights violations.
• 🙋🏿♀️ Let’s close the gap | Gap between men and women in the Colombian Congress.

Textile technology

Arts and creation can also bring data closer to people. This is one of the flags of our Culture area, which was in charge of carrying out the Colombia chapter of Hilando Futuros 2050, which was also developed in Mexico, Uruguay and Costa Rica. The project worked with fabrics as technology that proposed dialogues on Latin American futures through data. It was an honor that this cultural expression was exhibited at América Abierta. 👉🏽 Find out more about the expo.

We hope you enjoyed this short summary of the event and that we will see you next year in Uruguay.