Best wishes for 2018 from OK Nepal to all of the Open Knowledge family and friends!!

The year 2017 was one of the best years for Open Knowledge Nepal. We started our journey by registering Open Knowledge Nepal as a non-profit organization under the Nepal Government and as we start to reflect 2017, it has been “A Year to Remember”. We were able to achieve many things and we promise to continue our hard work to improve the State of Open Data in South Asia in 2018 also.

Some of the key highlights of 2017 are:

1. Organizing Open Data Day 2017

For the 5th time in a row, the Open Knowledge Nepal team led the effort of organizing International Open Data Day at Pokhara, Nepal. This year it was a collaborative effort of Kathmandu Living Labs and Open Knowledge Nepal. It was also the first official event of Open Knowledge Nepal that was held out of the Kathmandu Valley.

2. Launching Election Nepal Portal  

On 13th April 2017 (31st Chaitra 2073), a day before Nepalese New Year 2074, we officially released the  Election Nepal Portal in collaboration with Code for Nepal and made it open for contribution. Election Nepal is a crowdsourced citizen engagement portal that includes the Local Elections data. The portal will have three major focus areas; visualizations, datasets, and twitter feeds.

3. Contributing to Global Open Data Index  

On May 2nd, 2017 Open Knowledge International launched the 4th edition of Global Open Data Index (GODI), a global assessment of open government data publication. Nepal has been part of this global assessment continuously for four years with lots of ups and downs. We have been leading it since the very beginning. With 20% of openness, Nepal was ranked 69 in 2016 Global Open Data Index. Also, this year we helped Open Knowledge International by coordinating for South Asia region and for the first time, we were able to get contributions from Bhutan and Afghanistan.

4. Launching Local Boundaries   

To help journalists and researchers visualize the geographical data of Nepal in a map, we build Local Boundaries where we share the shapefile of Nepal federal structure and others. Local Boundaries brings the detailed geodata of administrative units or maps of all administrative boundaries defined by Nepal Government in an open and reusable format, free of cost. The local boundaries are available in two formats (TopoJSON and GeoJSON) and can be easily reused to map local authority data to OpenStreetMap, Google Map, Leaflet or MapBox interactively.

5. Launching Open Data Handbook Nepali Version

After the work of a year followed by a series of discussion and consultation, on 7 August 2017 Open Knowledge Nepal launched the first version of Nepali Open Data Handbook– An introductory guidebook used by governments and civil society organizations around the world as an introduction and blueprint for open data projects. The handbook was translated with the collaborative effort by volunteers and contributors.  Now the Nepali Handbook is available at http://handbook.oknp.org

6. Developing Open Data Curriculum and Open Data Manual  

To organize the open data awareness program in a structured format and to generate resources which can be further use by civil society and institution, Open Knowledge Nepal prepared an Open Data Curriculum and Open Data Manual. It contains basic aspects of open data like an introduction, importance, principles, application areas as well as the technical aspects of open data like extraction, cleaning, analysis, and visualization of data. It works as a reference and a recommended guide for university students, private sectors, and civil society.

7. Running Open Data Awareness Program

The Open Data Awareness Program was conducted in 11 colleges and 2 youth organization, reaching more than 335+ youths are first of its kind conducted in Nepal. Representatives of Open Knowledge Nepal visited 7 districts of Nepal with the Open Data Curriculum and the Open Data Manual to train youths about the importance and use of open data.

8. Organizing Open Data Hackathon  

The Open Data Hackathon was organized with the theme “Use data to solve local problems faced by Nepali citizens” at Yalamaya Kendra (Dhokaima Cafe), Patan Dhoka on November 25th, 2017. In this hackathon, we brought students and youths from different backgrounds under the same roof to work collaboratively on different aspects of open data.

9. Co-organizing Wiki Data-a-thon

On 30th November 2017, we co-organized a Wiki Data-a-thon with Wikimedians of Nepal at Nepal Connection, Thamel on the occasion of Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW). During the event, we scraped the data of last CA election and pushed those data in WikiData.

10. Supporting Asian Regional Meeting  

On 2nd and 3rd December 2017, we supported Open Access Nepal to organize Asian Regional Meeting on Open Access, Open Education and Open Data with the theme “Open in Action: Bridging the Information Divide”. Delegates were from different countries like the USA, China, South Africa, India, Bangladesh, China, Nepal. We managed the Nepali delegates and participants.

2018 Planning

We are looking forward to a prosperous 2018, where we plan to outreach the whole of South Asia countries to improve the state of open data in the region by using focused open data training, research, and projects. For this, we will be collaborating with all possible CSOs working in Asia and will serve as an intermediary for different international organizations who want to promote or increase their activities in Asian countries. This will help the Open Knowledge Network in the long run, and we will also get opportunities to learn from each others’ successes and failures, promote each other’s activities, brainstorm collaborative projects and make the relationship between countries stronger.

Besides this, we will continue also our work of data literacy like Open Data Awareness Program to make Nepalese citizens more data demanding and savvy, and launch a couple of new projects to help people to understand the available data.

To be updated about our activities, please follow us at different medias:

• Website: http://oknp.org
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/okfn_np
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/okfnepal/