# Learnings from The Humanitarian Data eXchange (HDX)

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**[The Humanitarian Data Exchange](centre.humdata.org/)** or `HDX`, an initiative started by [UN OCHA](https://www.unocha.org/) (The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), was created to find, share and use humanitarian data all in one place. The platform itself hosts a lot of important datasets, which are maintained by the respective team and users, that are used at crucial times especially during emergencies and natural disasters.

It's an inspirational example for us now as we start building a very similar platform for the Law and Justice ecosystem in the country. While the data in this sector has the potential for saving lives and protecting the rights of individuals, the accessibility of these datasets is still a big problem to solve for. The systems of law and justice are now attempting to embrace the possibilities offered by adapting technology. This journey is one, which all of us play a part, people working within the judiciary and even outside the judiciary. Doing this collaboratively might help to create the kind of systems that work for us.

The problem of accesibility is not limited to a few datasets or organsiations, but is present around most of the sources of legal data. Improving the source itself is one solution, but it requires a lot of stakeholders and a lot of itme. Meanwhile, another way is for organisations to come together and start sharing the public datasets they curate, clean and work on. This not only help people discover good datasets, but also helps people, who are responsible to maintain the source, to identify the gaps and challenges in the current systems of data generation.

It is important for us to learn from platforms like HDX, who have been a part of this journey and have curated and worked around a lot of challenges that we might face in the fuure.

At this stage, we can only appreciate the efforts of the HDX team in documenting their learnings and sharing it with the larger community. It helps all of us in ways more than one. As a shareback to the community, we will by curating a few blogs around data sharing, governance, processes, community etc from the humdata portal.

As we learn a grow together, a good pratice should be to to cite the contribution from the HDX team, if you're using their content in some form or the other. This is a really small contribution we can make from our side, for the team that is working round the clock to curate these learnings for all of us.

**Links to blogs**