Last week,  lot of events were happening on support to develop the open, transparency and accountability Nepal. World Bank had directly involved to organize Open Data Literacy Bootcamp and hackathon where the international organization, civic institution like Open Institute, Open AID Partnership, Development Gateway participated to make it better. Open Nepal has launched at the same time. People from the different corners from United Stated to East Africa, from different leading organization World Bank to Open Institute stayed in Nepal and spread the knowledge what they sounds. At the time, We(Nepali Hackers) invited them to our hackers space. It was not like on plan or practice, we just asked one of them, Friedrich (@pudo) agreed. and we spread this news to some of our developer mailing list. As the result, we made 25 hackers in same place.

Lets go to the point, How was the program, we started by introducing our k_(hacker’s Space) http://wiki.fossnepal.org/index.php?title=K, story behind how we came with the idea of such kind of space and how it differs in Nepal, what kind of FOSS projects we are intended to buildup. And then the ball was in their court, so pudo started telling from how he started his career, how he made interest in civic coding and attached with project of open spending and open AID. He added how the idea of OKFN in German came with and how they spread some idea all over the europe. Actually Friedrich came from Berlin, German. There was the another person with him, Pernilla Nasfors(@pernillan), a Swedish girl work in open AID Partnership in World Bank Institute inWashington DC. She share the journey up to the Open AID Partnership, She worked on open source TTS/IVR for long time. Open AID partnership works for collaboration between different organization with goal of finding the AID flow, she said that they are in conversation with Nepal Government to make the AID data open. Nepal Government is also going to implement AID Management platform in Nepal, all aid data can easily managed in system so anybody can easily access those information.

World Bank and different Donors are pushing from up side but the people should be aware with Right to Information. She suggest the nepali civil organizations should work to empower general people to ask for their right to information.

In discussion, those guys suggest us different ideas, so how can the hacker and civic organizations move in more like sustainable way and in more goal oriented way. Friedrich suggest 3 things to nepali hackers:

 First idea was work on the general interest like make the portal for making all public interested information (authority, aid and information) more similar like whatdotheyknow.com. So this will create the chances to get in touch with public.

 Second idea was in getting the government tender, they said they have seen lot of tenders from government, so nepali hacker should try to get those tender.

 Third thing was to make always good relation with media, so media can be good partners for the hackers group who are working in social issues.

 Pernilla added the one of the concentration and interest of foreign AID and Donors is know where is their money, in Nepal, Donors don’t know where there money goes, they just give that money to line ministers, where line minister spread that money to different regional and district authority but it can’t sure weather those money reached to the targeted people.

 The participants/Nepali Hackers shared what they build up https://github.com/foss-np and also the problem they faced while working, they showed what they have already build on. We talked about Hacks and Hackers chapter in Nepal to strengthen these hacking activities.

 Lastly, one hacker’s team showed the project called Presentation 2.O . It was amazing that Friedrich and Pernialla took that projects interestingly. https://github.com/deepsadhi/Presentation2.O ……

 Oh!! How I forgot, Those guys offered us drinks, wow… it was really fun, we went to the top of Civil Mall @ food court, we stayed there, played a game in mobile, discussed….

 Anyway we learned lot from those guys, and now we seems more confident and more clear on what we are doing.

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