Wrapping up 2018, we’d like to take this opportunity to thanks everyone who supported us over the past year. In this cold winter season, we tried to reflect our key works of 2018 over the cup of coffee.

2018 has been the year of collaboration and growth. As our commitment in last year’s blog, we still will remain focus and dedicate all our energy/resources to improve the state of Open Data in South Asia.

 

Key highlights of 2018 are:

1. A celebration of International Open Data Day 2018 in Nepal: We collaborated with Open Nepal community of practice to organize Open Data Day 2018, which is one of the biggest celebrations of open data. Unlike previous years we celebrated this year open data day slight differently. This year the way we celebrated open data was different, in-fact we implemented the core concept of OPEN in real life by hosting it in a publicly accessible place. We also organize the side event “Data-a-thon for Journalist” in collaboration with Central for Data Journalism Nepal to train journalists.
2. Launching Open Data Nepal: We invested much of our technical and human resource to build and launch a crowdsourced open data portal to make Nepal’s data accessible online. Till now more than 600+ datasets have been harvested from various governmental source and a huge volunteer team of data wranglers is working actively to increase the number of datasets.
3. Joining Open Nepal community of practice and knowledge hub: With the aim of demonstrating our dedication and enthusiasm towards open data, we joined Open Nepal community of practices and knowledge hub. Currently, 10 different organization are the part of Open Nepal community.
4. Hack for Nepal Initiative: In collaboration with Code for Nepal, we launched Hack for Nepal initiative and hosted AngelHack Hackathon for the first time in Nepal. This was our first experience of hosting an overnight hackathon, where more than 70 participants compete to build ‘Seamless Technology for Humanitarian Response’.
5. Improving AskNepal platform: To make the data and information request easier, we joined hands with Code for Nepal to improve the AskNepal platform, which can be used by everyone to request information with different bodies of Nepal Government. AskNepal is run and maintained by Open Knowledge Nepal and Code for Nepal, in partnership with mySociety.
6. Travelling 3 provinces to train about open data: In collaboration with YUWA, we travelled 6 districts of Nepal to train 126 youths of various background. The aim of the project was to create a network of young data leaders who will lead and support the development of their communities through the use of open data as evidence for youth-led and data-driven development.
7. Participation at UN World Data Forum 2018: With the help of scholarship provided by the Data for Development (D4D) Program in Nepal, we were able to mark our presence at UN World Data Forum 2018, which gave us an opportunity for learning and networking.
8. Participation in Open Data Training of Trainers Course by The Open Data Institute, UK: The five days rigorous training took place in Nepal from 26th to 30th November 2018 and thanks for the D4D team for bringing the Open Data Institute to Nepal. Throughout this training, we learned to develop an understanding of open data principles and learned to create, deliver and evaluate high-quality interactive training.

Thank you again for your continuous support for our work. Expect few events and workshops, our focus was entirely on building a civic-tech platform and ecosystem to encourage the use of open data and In 2019, we look forward to harnessing our capacity to support this moment fully.

 

Our plans for 2019:

1. Promoting the value of diverse data: Adding up on our effort of opening up government data through our Open Data Nepal portal, we look forward to promote the diverse field of data in Nepal. Our focus will be around WikiData, Citizen Generated Data, Inclusive and Disable Data, Data for SDG and Personal Data (MyData).
2. Increasing/Improving the women participation: We plan to work continuously to improve the women participants in open data and civic-tech in Nepal. For this, we definitely look forward to join hands with others civil societies organization and institutions.
3. Opening up more datasets: We will be harvesting more datasets to solve the problem of data scarcity and promote the culture of data-driven decision making in Nepal.
4. Collaboration with Government and International Organization: Our focus will be on working with government directly through policy and technology lobbying. We will be pushing the government to conduct open data activities and join hands with an international organization for support.

 

Acknowledgment

We would especially like to thank Data for Development (D4D) Program in Nepal for financially supporting most of the key activities of 2018, we are also grateful to the Code for Nepal, Central for Data Journalism Nepal, YUWA and Open Nepal Community, whom we partnered for the successful implementation of activities and projects.

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/