Both science public outreach and citizen science projects have gained immense momentum in the western world in recent years. This work aims to outline some ongoing and possible future projects in the developing world on this front. Cooperation and collaboration with IAU-OAD is envisaged.

Astronomy has largely relied on imagery and innovative data mining techniques. This article briefly illustrates the use of machine learning to create agricultural production data sets from satellite imagery to answer different development questions. Of late, astronomy has also relied on citizen science in the identification of new galaxies (a case in point is the Galaxy Zoo project). The use of citizen science in the examination of changes in urban informality patterns in developing countries (another development question) is also discussed.

The Astroinformatics Program is funded by the Chilean Economy Ministry’s (FIE Grant FIE-2016-V022, CORFO Grant 16IFI6626) with the mission to identify and initiate investments to foster Chilean Digital Economy, using Astronomy data-centric tools (known as astroinformatics). Over 2017 we worked with communities across sectors identifying opportunities to achieve the program mission, the Data Observatory vision emerged from that work and will guide design activities throughout 2018.