CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hey folks,

I am leading a Making Kabissa data open session at Open Data for Development Camp in Amsterdam on Thursday that I think might be of interest to others using CiviCRM to manage contacts and organizations and interested in exposing some of that content to other organizations via open data. If you are interested in getting involved, know of other similar initiatives, or have opinions/requirements you'd like considered please add a comment there and/or let me know here. Thanks!

I also will be pitching Kabissa as a "data set owner" right at the beginning of the Camp - Data sets, apps and project pitches session described as follows: "Various data set owners are attending the Camp, and some people already work on applications or projects. Each will have a chance to pitch their offers and needs in 2 to 5 minutes."

Cheers,

Tobias

-- cut here for my session description --

Making Kabissa data open
http://openforchange.info/content/making-kabissa-data-open-0

Kabissa is an organization started in 1999 that aims to connect people and organizations for Africa using an online platform built using Drupal and CiviCRM. Existing functionality includes a searchable online directory and map that is managed directly by people working in member organizations.

At this session, I would like to discuss possibilities for using open data to make our online database of over 1500 organisations in Africa more widely useful and to more effectively help increase the exposure of our member organizations online and to build up the reputation and trust of organizations that are doing the best work on the ground.

Ideal outcomes would be:

    Use cases
    Data model
    Roadmap
    Potential partners

Hi everyone -

I wanted to let you know that I have created a page at http://www.kabissa.org/open explaining the opportunities in Open Data for Kabissa, and outcomes from the Open Data for Development Camp.

I have pasted below the relevant bit from that page for the CiviCRM community:

What would Kabissa Open Data look like?

On the technical level, going Open Data is trivial. Our site is powered by Drupal and CiviCRM, two integrated open source platforms. We can use Drupal Views (see screenshot) to expose any number of data, filterable by various criteria, in a machine readable format.

We could also consider doing a larger "CiviCRM open API project" to create a CiviCRM plugin that would provide user-friendly interfaces on the backend for exposing contact data via an open API, or a dashboard on the frontend that lets users create their own views based on personalized filters (e.g. by country or thematic area or keyword) which then would provide options for downloading data in XML or CSV.

At the Open Data for Development Camp in May 2011, volunteer programmers succeeded in creating an Application Programmer Interface (API) that allows a download of Kabissa organization directory data in CSV or XML format suitable for manipulation in a spreadsheet program or mashing up with other data and maps.

It would be interesting to find out what others have already done in this area and how much interest there is for doing more to make it easier to provide CiviCRM contact data via Open Data. What other use cases are there for an open API for CiviCRM? What are technical considerations? What are the risks?

Perhaps we could jointly write a proposal for this so that we can all benefit from it. The alternative for Kabissa is to create the API by hand which is cumbersome but does the job.

Cheers,

Tobias