Reimagining Open Data during Disaster Response: Applying a Feminist Lens to Three Open Data Projects in Post-Earthquake Nepal

Open Data has become a prominent ideal in humanitarian information work and is increasingly promoted for crisis situations to increase effectiveness and accountability and empower citizens. However, like all socio-technical systems, disaster data platforms make implicit and explicit assumptions about dataset, data users, disasters, and the society. In this paper, we turn to feminist theory to highlight and link the socio-political nature of both disasters and open data platforms. We used the seven principles of Data Feminism introduced by D'Ignazio and Klein to design an evaluative framework to examine three open data projects rolled out in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. Through this framework, we highlight significant gaps in how these projects made labor (in)visible, engaged with affective aspects of disaster, addressed context, and challenged power. We argue that these gaps are reflective of dominant practices in open data for disasters and serve as opportunities for designers and crisis informatics researchers to reimagine the goals and objective of such projects. We propose four ways of doing so based on feminist principles and values.