Nepal Open Data Index measures the openness of key data published by Nepal Government’s local bodies, Metropolitan City Offices, Sub-metropolitan City Offices, District Development Committees (DDC), Village Development Committees (VDC) etc. The main reason of running Nepal Open Data Index 2015 is to measure and monitor the state of open data across the local cities of Nepal. We believe, the Index is one right and easy tool where we can gather data availability from where publishers can also get encouragement to improve their published data standards and can peer-review everything. This will help in assessing the baseline of availability and nature of open data in Nepali cities so that we can identify gaps and plan actions to make maximum impact for minimum effort.

Each local city can also check their open datasets’ quality by comparing their data with others cities’ datasets. The another aim is to motivate and pressurize local bodies of Nepal government to publish their data under Open Definition / Open Format so that we can increase re-usability of government data. “Open Data is data that can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose”. This will increase transparency and accountability of government and will bring innovation inside government data. Citizen participation will be increased and we can improve government efficiency and policy making.

10 Cities for Survey

Last year, we measured openness of only two cities of Nepal, they were Kathmandu and Chitwan but from this year (2015) we have made some big changes. We will be measuring the openness of 10 cities of Nepal. We made this combination of ten cities by mixing some developed and developing cities of Nepal. By doing this we want to motivate those developing cities and want to show developed cities as an example.

This year we will be surveying: Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, Butwal, Chitwan, Dolakha, Dhading, Hetauda, Kavre, Lalitpur, Pokhara.

Datasets to Use

By looking at the condition of supply and demand side of data at our country Nepal, we have decreased our datasets in Nepal Open Data Index 2015. In past years we used 15 datasets they were: Real-Time Transit, Annual Budget, Expenditure (detailed), Election results, Air Quality, Transport Timetables, Public Facilities, Crime statistics, Procurement contracts, Food safety inspections, Traffic accidents, Building permits, Service Requests, Business Permits, Business Listings. But this year to use all this 15 datasets for an survey in a small developing country like Nepal, we found is somehow un-necessary so, from this year (2015) we decided to use only 6 datasets and they are:

1. Annual Budget : Municipal budget at a high level (e.g. spending by sector, department etc). This category is about budgets which are plans for expenditure (not actual expenditure in the past).
2. Procurement Contract : Per contract information on municipal contracts including amount, awardee (name, address), date awarded etc.
3. Crime Statistics : Data on municipal crime, preferably at a reasonably disaggregated level (best would be exact date, location and type but per day per street or post/zip code would be acceptable).
4. Business Permits : Data of registered Business Permits / Licenses.
5. Traffic Accident : Statistics on road traffic accidents including time and location.
6. Air Quality : Data on air quality (e.g. levels of major pollutants) on a granular basis – that is at least broken down by month (preferably by day). Geographic breakdown (e.g. by grid point) would be nice but is not required.

How we are gathering data

Like Global Open Data Index , Nepal Open Data Index is also a crowdsourced survey and open for everyone. Anyone from every corner of the world can submit their information but only member of Open Knowledge Nepal can review it.  But, to make Index more accurate and trustworthy, we assigned 10 local contributor / volunteers for 10 cities concept.

Kudos to our contributors:

Kathmandu – Nikesh Balami (nikeshbalami@gmail.com)

Bhaktapur – Shristi Baral (baral.shristi@gmail.com)

Butwal – Hemanta Rijal (foreverhemanta221@gmail.com)

Chitwan – Arun Kumar Pyasi (info@arun.info.np)

Dolakha – Sagar Ghimire (info@sagarg.com.np),

Dhading – Rajan Silwal (silwalrajan18@gmail.com)

Hetauda – Ujjwal Hatuwal (Ujjwalhatuwal@gmail.com)

Kavre – Sandeep Neupane (deep.newsun@gmail.com)

Lalitpur – Firoj Ghimire (firojghimire@gmail.com)

Pokhara – Sushil Magar (np.msushil@gmail.com)

Our volunteer Shubham Ghimire (shubhamghimire1996@gmail.com) helped all contributors throughout the process.