It was one fine Thursday evening and OKF Nepal had its meeting scheduled. There was much to discuss. Good news, plans, ideas, and more.

Activities previously done by OKF Nepal like Open Election Data Week, City Spending Data Party, involvement in events that supported openness in Nepal like Open Nepal Hackathon etc. were catching attention of other communities of Open Knowledge Foundation. Such recognition boosts our morale to do more.

The meetup’s main agenda was Open Spending Nepal. A beta version had recently been released. It is aimed to present open data about budgets and spending in Nepal in a way that is easy to understand, and is interactive.Only budgets of Nepal Government and of Kathmandu Metropolitan City for the running fiscal year are openly available. We are looking to gain more open data by contacting relevant government offices. Project co-ordinator Manish Dangol also elaborated his plans to go further, and also the problems that he has faced. The set of problems that he has faced so far includes: problems in scraping data available in Nepali typefaces, unavailability of spending and budget data of Nepal etc. Manish also raised a point about need of tutorials in the OKFN site.

An idea about running an internal learning and sharing session about data scraping, visualization, etc. was also discussed. The plan is to meet 2 hours every Saturday evening to share and teach skill one has related to data to rest of the community members. In this process, we also plan to gain experience about teaching, developing course content and methodology. It will help when we will teach those skills to people outside the community.

Another valued community member, Nikesh Balami came up with an idea of creating an open data hub for Nepal. On such datahub already exists in opennepal.net. Different tools like CKAN, datahub.io etc. can be used. An idea of creating a repository of sources of open data was also discussed.

It was an overall productives session with discussion of ideas and presentation of progress of OKF Nepal. The meetup included with a conclusion of starting the data inter learning sessions from the Saturday after next one, and also releasing OpenSpendingNepal.org in 1st of Baisakh next year.