Today StatPlanet - winner of the World Bank's Apps for Development competition - gets an open source version. StatSilk is taking the next step towards open standards, open data, open content, open source and open innovation, in line with the Principles for Digital Development - created and endorsed by organizations such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, UNDP and the World Bank.

Below is a brief history of StatSilk's support for the Principles for Digital Development since 2008:

• May 27, 2019: The first fully open source version of StatPlanet is released on GitHub. It integrates with various open source libraries, as well as the HighCharts 'HighMaps' plugin which is free for non-commercial purposes - Leafletjs could potentially be used as an open source alternative.
• 2017: StatPlanet supports the international open standard SDMX for Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange. SDMX (ISO 17369:2013) is an international initiative to standardize and modernise data / meta data exchange.
• 2016: The HTML5/JS version of StatPlanet was launched - StatPlanet Cloud - a fully mobile compatible version of the software which no longer depends on a plugin (Flash). It also furthered the transition to open source, as StatPlanet Cloud builds on several open source JavaScript libraries.
• 2014: StatPlanet interface is translated into 12 languages, and the user guide is translated into Bahasa (Indonesian), French, Spanish and Russian, with the support of the StatPlanet community.
• 2013: StatPlanet Story panel introduced, enabling any content - including existing web pages - to be integrated within StatPlanet (linked to specific indicators).
• 2012: StatPlanet documentation and training resources are released under a Creative Commons license.
• 2011: StatPlanet wins first prize in the World Bank's Apps for Development competition, for automatically visualizing & mapping the World Bank's entire 'open data' database with 8000+ indicators. World Bank Group President (in 2011) Robert B. Zoellick said, “One of the reasons we threw open the doors to our data was that we recognized we don’t have a monopoly on innovation. These apps clearly demonstrate how the software development community can harness technology to analyze and tackle some of the world's long-standing problems. It’s fantastic to see the creative approaches each of the finalists took, and it’s also great to see that the submissions came from six continents.”
• 2010: StatPlanet provides full support for shapefile maps using an open source mapping library.
• 2009: The open source Excel-based StatPlanet Data Manager is released under the GNU GPL 3.0 license.
• 2008: StatPlanet 1.0 is released - intended to provide a free, easy to use data visualization and mapping solution for non-profits, government agencies and UN organizations. StatPlanet was the world's first web-based visualization application integrating interactive maps and graphs in a single dashboard, through a custom-built visualization engine.

StatPlanet is a collection of open source libraries working together to approximate the functionality of commercial products such as Tableau and Power Bi, with the flexibility and cost savings allowed by open source, and easy of use that has been a defining element of the StatPlanet series of products over more than a decade.

I look forward to seeing how the open source version of StatPlanet will be used and adapted to further support data visualization, mapping, data analysis, and ultimately evidence-informed decision making.

- Frank van Cappelle, StatSilk founder