GODAN is delighted to announce that the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Open Data Data Management in Agriculture and Nutrition is now available in French, thanks to the generous efforts of GODAN Partner, the African Francophone community for open data, CAFDO.

THE COURSE MATERIALS ARE AVAILABLE HERE FOR USE OR DOWNLOAD

The intended audience is reasonably broad, including information professionals interested in open data research and management (including ICT specialists, STEM journalists, communications professionals and archivists), data scientists and researchers, and policy and decision makers.

The MOOC is a comprehensive introduction to open data and its applications for agriculture and nutrition. It deals with such themes as: how to deal with different types of data formats and uses; and, the importance of reliability, accessibility, interoperability and transparency of data. Key knowledge and concepts needed by the target audience are provided, as well as task-based training designed to support data professionals in their daily activities.

Andre Laperriere, GODAN Executive Director said: "We are pleased to be able to offer this capacity development tool to the benefit of the Francophone open data and agriculture community.

In order to address food security challenges facing the global community, policy makers and governments need to introduce cohesive open data policies to improve the practices of farmers and the functioning of supply chains, and maximise potential. By amplifying capacity development efforts, through simple but effective initiatives that make open data even more inclusive and accessible, we can pave the way to better open data practices and more equitable policy."​

Created by GODAN's capacity development network GODAN Action, the course was delivered 5 times between November 2017 and November 2018, reaching over 5000 people globally, before being made available for unrestricted use on github HERE. The content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0), and citable on Zenodo.

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We have already received considerable interest in making this useful resource available in additional language versions, and we are looking for collaborations with further partners for other languages, with Spanish and Portuguese a priority.

If you or your organisation are interested in participating in this effort, please contact Operations Director (samuel.compton@godan.info), explaining how you intend to contribute (expertise, resources...) to the editorial work to ensure it is accurate and of high quality, including a versioning strategy in case of updates to the original text.