Nigeria’s extractive industries are notorious for being opaque. Allegations of corruption exist at every stage of the value chain. Data made public, in the right format, can be used by citizens to hold the government and other extractive industry players accountable. Unfortunately, data on Nigeria’s extractive industries is hard to come by and even when you have it, it is seldom in a format for average citizen’s to make sense of.

For Follow the Data Extractive Hack, DFID and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) have made available an extensive array of data concerning the global and Nigeria-specific extractive sector. The task for participants in the hack is to make sense of the data and build creative ways to use accessible technology to present the information to a variety of key stakeholders including citizens, host communities, legislators, foreign partners, investors, civil society organisations etc.

5 teams drawn from subject matter experts and industry professionals will work with a team of web and mobile software developers and designers from the CcHUB community  to recognise the unique perspectives and insights using the data at our disposal to make Nigeria’s extractive sector more transparent. They will be converting these insights into relevant technology tools for the web or mobile.

The developers and designers in each team will have 2 days to build the tool with a guiding theme of ‘Making the most of oil, gas and mining data for the poor’ . The teams will then present their outcomes to a panel of judges who will select the top 3 tools.

The top three teams will be awarded 1^st prize – N 420,000.00, 2^nd prize – N 300,000.00 and 3^rd prize – N 180,000.00 which will go to the technologists for developing the solution.

There may be opportunity for further funding from DFID for participating organizations who choose to drive implementation of the tools in your work after the hack.

Details for the event are as follows –

Date: 13^th -14^th May, 2013

Venue: Co-Creation Hub, 6^th Floor, 294 Herbert Macaulay Way, Sabo, Yaba, Lagos

Time: 9am – 6pm each day