World was celebrating International Open Data Day Hackathon in more than 100 cities. In Nepal, for the first time, Young Innovations, OpenDRI/WorldBank and Mozilla together with co-organizers like Freedom Forum, NGO Federation of Nepal, aidInfo, Wikimedia Nepal, Institute of Engineering, Kathmandu University, OSAC, FOSS Nepal, NEC and other supporters celebrated Open Data Day on February 23, 2013 (Saturday).  More than 400 participants were visited event. The event was full of activities ranging from hackathon( where hackers sat for 5 hours and cook some apps) to open stalls (where people loved to hang out with what stalls showed them). The interesting thing was the excited crowed was looking for Mozillians (who had travelled Kathmandu from different cities for event).

What happened in Open Data Day in Nepal:

Presentation

Program was started with the presentation on what is Open Data and Open Data Day, Why Open Data, why the world is moving toward the open data and how it makes sense for Nepalese. Open DRI presented about the Open Street Map and explore how much works has been done and where this movement is forwarding.    Wikimedia Nepal gave presentation on Wikipedia and other presentations were done by Mozilla.

Open Data Hackathon

The whole day, hackers were drowning in the spot coding sprint. This means developers, designers, statisticians, analysts and data geeks were sitting  together and used the data that is there in public domain to create applications and products that gives more meaning to these data. After uninterrupted hours of hacking, they finally presented the prototype of their developed application to judge. “Petroleum Product” visualizing the data of Nepal Oil Corporation and comparing it with the Indian Oil Corporation, won the first prize, and they got Rs. 10K. “Obudget” and “Open Data Social” both won the Runnerup and got 5K price each.

Mapathon

The World Bank’s Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) conducted Mapathon wherein the participants collected field data, edit and digitize satellite imagery to create an open and free online map of the Kathmandu Valley using open street map. It started in 9:45 with 53 mappers and the team of mentors from NEC and KU, OpenDRI. All the participants were taught about the tools that they would be using to edit building footprints. Interesting that day, Nepal was ranked with in top 10 for OSM edits in the world with 53 mappers and 51,888 nodes.

WikiEditathon

Wikimedia Nepal had started with the PowerPoint presentation and later done some wiki editathon. Wikimedia team had also a stall for interacting with visitors came there.

Mozilla South Asia Meetup-Public Event

This event was very different and very anticipation not because of participation of Mozilla in Open Data Day, but due to reason of participation of 17 community leaders from communities of South Asian regions. The program was started with the introduction of Mozilla Nepal followed by demonstration of  Firefox OS(B2G) in simulator.  People share about the localization and progress have done by nepali community as well. Guys from other community also presented other products like webmakers, x-ray goggles, pop-corn makers and other. They shared how other people beyond the technical knowledge can contribute in Mozilla. Later on crowd were very excited to see and feel the Firefox mobile handsets and interact with Mozilla community members.

Open Data Stalls

There were around 10 different stalls to showcase activities and initiatives related to Open Data Initiatives in Nepal from civil society, academia, tech-community, etc.

The open data is the part of open movement of Nepal like open Source, open access. This is program will be the great step toward the embellishment of open transparent Nepal and civil participating environment in National issues and agenda

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