Building Infrastructure

In order to support ease of access and use of data for civil society organisations, Tarkam is building a federated repository. The federated model will allow organisations to have control and ownership over their own data, while allowing them to share it with others. For example, if an organisation XYZ wants to share their data through the repository, their data will continue to remain at data.xyz.org, and the repository will point to their database. Such a federated database implementation allays any fears of threats to ownership, for organisations will remain custodians of their own data. Alongside data, the repository will host a bank of tools curated to suit the needs of different civil society groups and organisations. These tools will help civil society actors make sense of the data, and imagine possibilities.

Key features of the repository’s design include:

• Design for collaboration: From following established data standards that allow for inter-operability, to providing appropriate meta-data for ease of access and use, the repository will be designed to ease collaboration.
• Design for ease of access, use, and exploration: As the repository is intended to be used by a wide variety of audiences, with varying levels of comfort and ease of interacting with data, the repository will have different features to enable ease of access, use, and exploration. For instance, the repository will have a natural language querying feature (something akin to a chatbot) for people to interact with the library, as well as intuitive visualisation layers over the database to immediately imagine possible contexts of use.
• FAIR: The repository will adhere to FAIR data principles, which state that the data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.