I recently participated in the GODAN Summit. What really struck me was that every speaker at the summit, especially those who spoke at the plenaries, recognised that “Open Data” is much more than opening access to data. They all stressed that it is about managing data from generation to effective use, about equity in its ownership, use and benefits from data use and about economic and social responsibility as generators, managers, custodians and users of data.

The three GODAN papers[i] released at the Summit significantly enlarged the dialogue on open data. There was the key recognition that in an agriculture that is increasingly become knowledge intensive and where decisions need to be made on accurate, reliable information, data is an invaluable resource. Within this recognition was also the fact that there exists severe resource inequality and that resource poor smallholder farmers are also the ones who have poor…