ARIES for SEEA Sector Hub at UN Big Data Conference!
Ikerbasque research fellow at BC3 and ARIES managing director Stefano Balbi presented the ARIES for SEEA Sector Hub in the “Sustainability and the global economic recovery” panel at the 7th international conference on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
On Day 1 of the event, Balbi joined Dean Affandi from WRI Indonesia and keynote speaker Hamza Ali Malik from the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) in the panel moderated by Rachel Beaven (UNESCAP). They highlighted the need for data producers to work with policymakers to make sure that data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) and actually getting used for the collective good.
“Joining up the data producers with the data users globally would not only allow us to find out what others are doing, but also learn from each other and realize we are not on our own. We can do this in partnership so much better.” (Rachel Beaven)
During the panel discussion, Balbi had the chance to introduce the work of the ARIES Team at BC3 and the freshly-released news of the creation of a Sector Hub as part of the UN Global Platform. ARIES managing director stressed the importance of making available to the public the best data locally available in order to produce the best knowledge locally available and mentioned how ARIES is working towards overcoming this great challenge.
“Our sector hub has its own physical infrastructure – “the cloud” is actually somewhere, and the data is managed by somebody. We need to be aware of who is managing the data and for what purposes. If the objective is to guarantee the collective good, then we need to make sure that the governance of this data is made for the collective good.” (Stefano Balbi)
On Day 2 the round table focused more on the possible collaborations between the UN Global Platform Hubs and the task teams.
Aside from the initial two days of conference, there were a number of workshops and hackathons. On the two first days of the conference, the use of new data sources and the use of data science was discussed with decision-makers and experts from all stakeholder communities.