Ethiopia: OpenCon 2018 Addis Abeba

A notable event was held in celebration of Open Data Day 2018 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Open Knowledge Ethiopia with the support of Addis Ababa University, Open Knowledge International and SPARC hosted OpenCon 2018 Addis Ababa (a satellite event of the global annual OpenCon meeting). The event brought together 25 participants including students, researchers, academics and Librarians. 

The Open Data Day event in Ethiopia was officially opened by Mr. Mesfin Gezahegn, University Librarian of Addis Ababa University (AAU). He stressed that AAU strongly supports open data initiatives and hosted various workshops and trainings in open data, open access and open science. He also promised that the University will continue supporting open data initiatives in the future. Following the opening, Mr. Solomon Mekonnen of AAU introduced participants to open science concepts with sharing international initiatives related to open science that can also be applied in Ethiopia. 

The next talk was about open research data by Dr. Melkamu Beyene, Assistant professor at AAU, focusing on the advantages of opening research data and issues to be considered when sharing data. The final presentation for the morning session was by Mr. Mesfin Gezahegn on the role of open data to fight 

corruption in Ethiopia.

Following the presentations, a panel discussion was conducted mainly focusing on open science and open research data. Major issues raised included licensing options when sharing research data, policy for open research data, creating awareness on open research data and open science and the role of open data communities in pushing forward the agenda of open science. 

In the afternoon session, several open science tools were demonstrated to the participants, including Zenodo, re3data, ORCID and the Open Science Framework (OSF). There was also a session for lighting talks which attracted two graduate students to talk about their research projects and get feedback from the participants. Postgraduate students Yemaneberhan Lemma and Olyad Fekede talked about their project on Linked data and Sentiment Analysis respectively connecting with open data. Mr. Michael Melese who is a PhD student at AAU also shared his experience on open science tools to the participants.

Finally the event was concluded by a discussion on future activities. It was agreed that the event successfully created awareness on open science and open research data, but it was stressed that there is a need for longer training on these topics to PhD students and early career researchers. It was also suggested that there should be monthly open knowledge Ethiopia community meetups to collaborate on open science issues that are raised in the workshop. The only challenge faced during the workshop, was power failure in the computer laboratory for some time in the middle of running the practical sessions but the participants use their personal laptop and smartphones to continue practicing on open science tools.